Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Elizabeth Hand - Black Light» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Город: New York, Год выпуска: 2012, ISBN: 2012, Издательство: Open Road Integrated Media, Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика, Фэнтези, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Black Light: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Black Light»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

One of Elizabeth Hand’s most critically acclaimed novels,
reveals a vision of ancient cults, gods, and fetishes—and a world where everyone loves an apocalyptic party
Lit Moylan lives what she thinks is an ordinary life. Sure, her town has a few eccentric theater types, but that’s all. That is until her Warholian godfather, Axel Kern, moves into the big house on the hill. He throws infamously depraved parties, full of drinks, drugs, and sex. But they also have a much more sinister purpose. At one of these parties, Lit touches a statue, and learns she has much more of a role to play in this world than she ever thought possible.
Ornate and decadent,
visits an irresistible world of ancient gods and secret societies as enthralling as it is dangerous.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Elizabeth Hand including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.
The privileged daughter of famous television actors, Charlotte, “Lit,” Moylan is ready to enjoy one last wild fling before college and adulthood. In fact, the whole idyllic hamlet of Kamensic, New York, is ready to party, for legendary avant-garde film director—and Lit’s godfather—Alex Kern is coming back to reopen his fabulous mansion, Bolerium. But it won’t be just any party. It’ll be the event of all time.
The whole town is invited, young and old, famous and obscure. But other, more disturbing guests are arriving, too—seen at the edges of the forest, at the margins of the night. Kern’s connections extend far beyond Hollywood, beyond even the modern age… and in Bolerium’s echoing halls a fearsome confrontation is gathering, between ancient powers of the darkness and those sworn to stop them at any cost, no matter what—or who—the sacrifice… even an innocent girl.
Hand does for upstate New York what Stephen King has done for rural Maine in this well-written but decidedly creepy dark fantasy about a Bohemian bedroom community and artists’ colony located about an hour from Manhattan by train. Seventeen-year-old Charlotte “Lit” Moylan, the daughter of two successful but second-rate TV actors, has never thought much about the oddities of her home town of KamensicAthe strangely decorated Congregational Church, for example, or the community’s unusual Halloween tradition, or the high number of suicides among the area’s younger citizens. Although she looks forward to going away to college next year, she’s basically content with her life. Then Kamensic’s most notorious citizen returns to his roots. Alex Kern, the successful avant-garde film director, brings with him a reputation for scandalous, extravagant and decadent parties, replete with perverse sexuality and heavy drug use. His mazelike mansion, Bolerium, sits on the hill overlooking Kamensic like some dangerous predatory beast. Eventually Lit and, indeed, everyone in town receives an invitation to a party, a gala event that, Hand hints, may be nothing less than a prelude to the Apocalypse. Something of a latter-day Aubrey Beardsley in prose, Hand has a talent for portraying forbidding millennial settings brimming with perverse antiheroes, suffering innocents and sadistic demigods. This book, although not quite the equal of her last two novels, Waking the Moon and Glimmering, should strongly appeal to aficionados of sophisticated horror.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Amazon.com Review
From
Although Charlotte Moylan thinks she lives a rather ordinary and oftentimes dull life, the reality is far different. Her father is best known as the famous TV personality Uncle Cosmo, and her mother is a 20-year veteran of the daytime drama
. They live in the New York community of Kamensic, an artistic enclave where the church is rarely used for religious ceremonies and where death is an “occupational hazard” for the young. The town is also home to Bolerium, a dark manor of indeterminate origin where the enigmatic and somewhat sinister film director Axel Kern lives when he’s not making movies.
Axel is Charlotte’s godfather, but he’s one guardian who may not be looking out for her best interests. Aside from making questionable films, Axel is also in cahoots with the old gods, and is interested in bringing a couple of them along with him to Kamensic. This puts the town—and Charlotte—at the center of an age-old struggle between two Illuminati-style groups, the more-or-less benign Benandanti (seen in Hand’s Tiptree Award-winning
) and their rivals, the Malandanti witches. As has become Hand’s modus operandi, she tells this story with a luxurious prose that’s at once beautiful and also somehow intellectually decadent. Although the book may be a bit slow-paced for some, those who enjoy a smart novel that’s rich in style and substance won’t want to miss it. —Craig E. Engler

Black Light — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Black Light», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

“Oh, but people do live here, Lit,” Ralph said, in the same soft, vague tone he had used before, as though talking in his sleep. He let his arm drop from me, bent, and began to dig in the ground. I crouched beside him, watching. The earth was hard but when he broke through the surface it became friable, falling in small chunks from his hand. He continued to dig, pausing now and then to examine what he found; finally held up a small piece of reddish rock.

“Ochre.” He rubbed the stone between his fingers and it crumbled, staining his hands. “‘Farben auch, den Leib zu malen, steckt ihm in die Hand, dass er rötlich möge strahlen in der Seelen Land.’”

He turned. With the chunk of rock he drew upon my forehead and upon each of my cheeks; then carefully smoothed the ochre across my skin. “That’s from Schiller. ‘Put ye colors into his hand, that he may paint his body so he will shine redly in the Land of Souls.’”

“What—what do you mean?”

He stood, rolling the piece of rock between his fingers and staring at the horizon. Very carefully I touched my cheek, drew my hand away and smelled damp earth and another odor, cold and faintly metallic, like old pennies. I looked at Ralph; he raised his arm and with a flick of his wrist threw the stone toward the sunset. It arced high above the lone birch tree, and by some trick of the light seemed for an instant to hang there and glow, not like a spark or star but like some glittering aperture, a watchful eye in the void. Then it was gone. I did not hear where it fell.

“There they are,” he murmured.

I looked where he pointed. On the horizon, a dark smudge appeared. I squinted, thinking at first it was another stand of birches suddenly made visible by the angle of the sun. But the smudge grew larger, broke into smaller jots of darkness and then regrouped. Soon it was near enough that the wind brought its sound. A jingling as of many small bells, unmelodic but constant; voices calling back and forth; an occasional explosive huffing. I glanced at Ralph uncertainly, but he only continued to peer into the deepening shadows.

Minutes passed. The breeze became a cold blast, and now along with the walking music of the caravan the wind carried its scent. Woodsmoke, birch leaves, the pungent and recognizable stench of unwashed bodies. But most of all a dense, warm, animal smell, far stronger than any familiar grassy barn odor—the only thing I could liken it to was the sharp, almost angry musk one encounters at a zoo. I moved closer to Ralph. He did not acknowledge me beyond nodding, his eyes fixed on what was approaching.

A moment and they were only twenty feet from us, near the birch where I had last glimpsed the bit of ochre that Ralph had tossed away. It seemed to me that full night should have fallen by now, but the eerie twilight had not corroded into darkness. If anything, the sky had grown more brilliant, the colors a tumult of lavender and violet and crimson.

Certainly it was bright enough that I could see clearly the little group that had stopped in front of us. I counted eleven of them, slight slim-bodied figures, most no taller than myself. Their clothes were archaic but gorgeously designed—long skirts of hide or fur, dyed red or sky-blue and hemmed with ropes of beadwork and bone; strange open jackets of the same material that were almost like frock coats, trimmed with white fur and small triangular brass pendants. I could see their features very clearly, high cheekbones and skin the color of bronze, onyx eyes and hair. The men wore small conical caps of short dark fur. Their facial hair was sparse but unshaven, their chins ending in wispy black beards. The women had their hair in long braids, strung with still more beads and white feathers; all save one, whose braid was laced with leather tassels dyed red. On their feet were flat-soled shoes of carven wood and hide. They spoke in soft fluting voices that were more birdlike than human, broken now and then by laughter or the cries of two small children toddling behind the grownups. As they moved across the taiga clouds of insects sprang up about them, gilded by the sunset. Watching them I felt a profound, almost childish joy—

Because, marvelous as the people were, what was most wonderful of all was that every one either rode or walked beside a reindeer. Not huge and terrifying stags like the one I had seen slain; nor were they the graceful, golden deer that leaped across the roads in Kamensic. These animals were like nothing I had ever seen before, save in the fairy-tale posters by Edmund Dulac that hung in Ali’s room—small, graceful, almost dainty creatures, their fur the soft gray of a kitten’s belly. Even their antlers seemed toylike, the tips sawn off and strung with gold filigree and brass bells, a child’s memory of Christmas Eve and restless movement upon a rooftop. Small as they were, they seemed to bear their slender riders with ease; all save the two animals which brought up the rear of the cavalcade. The first of these carried no rider, but only a large bundle wrapped in deerskin and bound with leather thongs.

But it was the last reindeer that was truly a creature from a dream. Snow-white, its fur dazzling in the eternal twilight. It alone bore antlers that had not had their prongs sawn and blunted, and it alone carried neither saddle nor any other ornament. A solitary figure walked alongside it, head bowed and hidden beneath a fur hood. A figure slight as the others but wearing garb that seemed at once more archaic than their own, and more hieratic— a long tunic of supple hide, and over this a long open-fronted jacket, white and unadorned save for bands of white fur at cuff and hem. At the neck hung a necklace formed of myriad loops of crimson beads, heavy and pliant as a woven scarf.

The figure walked in silence, its feet moving in step with the animal’s. The white reindeer drew closer to its fellows, cropping at the coarse moss beneath their hooves, but before it could join them its keeper raised a hand bearing a long thin wand and slapped it upon the flank. The white reindeer halted. The figure struck it again, and this time I could see that the wand was in fact an antler, all its points shorn save two which formed a V at the tip. At the wand’s touch the reindeer shook its head and snorted in protest. The figure cried out a word of command; the animal immediately fell silent and began to nose the moss at its feet.

“See how it listens to you,” a voice breathed beside me. I started—I had forgotten Ralph was there—but before I could question him the figure took a step away from the animal and stood directly beneath the birch tree. The wind tore at the milky folds of the tunic and made ripples in the hood’s thick fur. The figure stood for a moment, wand in one hand. Then it tugged the hood back, and turning to the white reindeer cried out again. Louder, so that the other people stopped milling about and stood docile as their little herd. The command meant nothing to me, of course; but this time I recognized the voice. I began to shake my head, mouthing the word No over and over again until Ralph had to cover my lips with his hand.

“Yes, Lit.” With his other hand he forced my head up so I could see. “Oh, yes, yes, yes…”

Where the furred hood had been was a brilliant corona of red hair, unbound and streaming in the wind like a pennon. It framed a face sun-coarsened and angular as the others’, but even in that remote place utterly unmistakable. The same tilted nose, the same black eyebrows belying that bright hair; the same pale, almost silvery gray eyes. I had stepped through a portal in Bolerium, to stand beneath an eternal arctic sunset and gaze upon myself.

“No!”

I yanked free from Ralph, shouting. As I did the red-haired girl jerked her head upright and stared at me, her expression mirroring my own.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Black Light»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Black Light» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Elizabeth Hand - Wylding Hall
Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand - Glimmering
Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand - Waking the Moon
Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand - Generation Loss
Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand - Icarus Descending
Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand - Æstival Tide
Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong
Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand - 12 Monkeys
Elizabeth Hand
Stephen Hunter - Black Light
Stephen Hunter
Elizabeth Power - Blackmailed For Her Baby
Elizabeth Power
Отзывы о книге «Black Light»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Black Light» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x