Elizabeth Hand

Novels, novellas, collections:

Waking the Moon — (1994) Publisher: Beginning her first year at the University of the Archangels, Katherine Sweeney Cassidy accidentally discovers the existence of the Benandanti, a clandestine order that has been secretly manipulating the world's governments and institutions.

Waking the Moon

I'm on either my third or fourth copy of Waking the Moon, I can't remember which. I first read it eleven years ago, loaned it to everyone I thought might be remotely interested, sometimes didn't get it back, and never felt quite right when I didn't have it on my shelf. This is one of my Desert Island Books.

The plot revolves around Sweeney Cassidy, an insecure college freshman who goes wild in her first semester away from home. She skips classes, stays out all night, and drinks staggering amounts of alcohol. Into this haze come the ethereal, effeminate Oliver and the seductive queen-bee Angelica, who become her best friends, and with both of whom Sweeney falls in love.

Sweeney has more on her plate than hangovers and term papers, however. Angelica turns out to be the chosen avatar of a long-forgotten goddess, and the college is controlled by the Benandanti, an ancient secret society dedicated to suppressing the worship of the goddess.

Eighteen years later, Sweeney has settled into an ordinary life. But her college ghosts come back to haunt her, as old friends come out of the woodwork and Angelica prepares for her final denouement with the Benandanti. Sweeney is suddenly back in the mysterious, perilous world she briefly glimpsed as a teenager.

One of the best touches of Elizabeth Hand's book is that she doesn't take sides. Patriarchy and matriarchy are both shown as flawed, and both the Benandanti and the devotees of the Goddess have blood on their hands. Even when Sweeney makes a fateful choice at the end, she makes it for personal reasons and not because she agrees with either faction.

Waking the Moon was the book that got me investigating Goddess mythology all those years ago, and it's also a fever-dream of a story, with a sympathetic heroine and unique prose. Elizabeth Hand has a writing style that is sensual, vivid, and more than a little bit psychedelic.

I used to identify strongly with Sweeney, whose self-doubt leads her to regard her glamorous friends with something close to worship. Over the years, as I've grown older and more comfortable in my skin, I've stopped feeling so much like Sweeney. Yet I always find something new in Waking the Moon every time I read it. I didn't realize, the first time, just how many little references to goddess lore were hidden in the text like Easter (or Eostre) eggs. Hand never wastes a detail when she can use it to enhance the story instead. And when I finally heard Nick Drake's "Northern Sky," I felt like I was having a beer with Sweeney during the record heatwave that strikes Washington, D.C. in the novel.

Even as I've discovered flaws and mistakes, it just feels like part of the journey. One of the nonfiction books I found by way of Waking the Moon was Anne Baring and Jules Cashford's The Myth of the Goddess, and while reading it, I found that Hand had accidentally read the wrong footnote and misattributed a bit of liturgy. My first reaction was not "oops, Elizabeth Hand messed up," but "this is COOL!" It was like getting to see the gears and wires behind the book, and it was fun.

Hmmm, my third (or maybe fourth) copy is looking a little threadbare. Maybe it's time for another... —Kelly Lasiter

Glimmering — (1997) Publisher: It is 1999. The Last Days, or some say, the First. The climate has warmed dramatically, the cities have imploded into riotous shards, and the sky is a glimmering array of reds and greens and golds. In fin de siecle New York, a millionaire publisher, a jaded rock star and the girl who, in her own way, loves them both are watching the waters rise as the cults begin the frenzies of the Night of the Thousand Years. This breathtaking novel is Elizabeth Hand's audacious attempt to capture in one explosive story both the unspoken dreams and the unspeakable nightmares of her generation. And she succeeds.

Last Summer at Mars Hill — (1998) Publisher: A collection of short stories centers around Mars Hill — a place where a healing presence know as Them exists and where young, dubious Moony Rising learns an amazing and powerful secret surpassing all the love she has ever known.

Black Light — (1999) Publisher: A creepy, fantastic mystery centred around the strange life of Anzeri Chakrulo — an enigmatic, charismatic cult director with a particular taste for the peculiar — and four teenagers on the cusp of adulthood: Lit Golding, Ali Fox and the Finn brothers.

Bibliomancy — (2003) Publisher: From Elizabeth Hand, one of America's leading literary fantasists, comes a collection of extraordinary novellas of damnation and dark revelation, epiphany and redemption. Written in the author's characteristic poetic prose, and rich with the detail of lives traumatic yet luminously transformed, these stories form a remarkable tapestry interweaving the supernatural and the mundane. Bibliomancy won the World Fantasy Award and was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers of America, a Intenational Horror Guild Award, and appeared on Locus Magazine's Year's Best lists. The collection includes the first print appearance of the short novel "Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol," along with "The Least Trumps", "Cleopatra Brimstone" and "Pavane for a Prince of the Air". Introduction by Lucius Shephard and story notes by the author. Cover art by 19th century painter John Anster Fitzgerald. (see left) Both "Pavane for a Prince of the Air" and "Cleopatra Brimstone" have won International Horror Guild Awards, and "The Least Trumps" was on the shortlist for BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2003, edited by Walter Mosley. "Chip Crockett," an homage to the late, legendary Joey Ramone, continues to wait for its chance to become an animnated Christmas Special.

Mortal Love — (2004) Publisher: Lush, thrilling, and erotically charged, a triumph of suspense and dazzling imagination, Elizabeth Hand's Mortal Love is an extraordinary work that spans more than a century, uniting genius past and present with strange, tensile strands of inspiration, obsession, and lust. A tragedy that occurs in a hospital for the insane in Frankfurt, Germany, will have repercussions across decades and eras. Several weeks after the death of a female patient in a terrible fire, the poet Algernon Swinburne follows a mysterious woman through the shadows toward a remarkable event at once enthralling, stimulating, and terrifying beneath the streets of London. Years later, at the start of a new century, a struggling young artist, Radborne Comstock, is introduced to a ravishing beauty who immediately becomes his muse, his desire, and his greatest torment. It is a legacy of pleasure and madness that will be passed down to his grandson, the dilettante actor Valentine Comstock, who is plagued by disturbing and increasingly erotic visions. And in the present day a journalist named Daniel Rowlands is seduced by the bewitching and mercurial Larkin Meade, who holds the key to lost artistic masterpieces, and to secrets too devastating to imagine. What connects these men — and others whose grand destinies are to imagine and create — is one woman. Eternal, unknowable, the very ideal of beautyand desirability, she exists somewhere beyond the boundaries of time, a sensuous dream of flesh and fantasy to inspire or destroy, an immortal lover... or an angel of death.

Mortal Love: A Sensual Tale

Elizabeth Hand, who famously dealt with the Mother Goddess myth in Waking the Moon and the cult of Dionysus in Black Light, here tackles the subject of the fatal muse: the White Goddess, the lhiannan-sidhe, the Belle Dame Sans Merci.

Mortal Love drifts back and forth between several periods of history, between men throughout the years who have fallen under her seductive spell. Along the way there are Hand's usual lush fruit-metaphors and insect-metaphors and jewel-metaphors, and as always her prose is an intoxicating fever-dream of a read.

Writing-wise, I think it was probably better than Waking the Moon, but I have to admit I liked Moon better. Moon had sympathetic, every-(wo)man sorts of characters who felt like old friends at first sight. Mortal Love has several characters who could be interesting, but Hand doesn't spend enough time with any of them to truly show us what makes them tick, and none of them feel as tangible as, say, Sweeney Cassidy did.

Still a good book, though, and a wonderful job of using faery material without making it cute or childish in the least, retaining the deadly mystery of the old tales. —Kelly Lasiter

Saffron & Brimstone — (2006) The story "Echo", which appears in Saffron & Brimstone, won the Nebula Award. Publisher: Widely praised and widely read, Elizabeth Hand is regarded as one of America's leading literary fantasists. This new collection (an expansion of the limited-release Bibliomancy, which won the World Fantasy Award in 2005) showcases a wildly inventive author at the height of her powers. Included in this collection are "The Least Trumps," in which a lonely women reaches out to the world through symbols, tattooing, and the Tarot, and "Pavane for a Prince of the Air," where neo-pagan rituals bring a recently departed soul to something very different than eternal rest. Written in the author's characteristic poetic prose and rich with the details of traumatic lives that are luminously transformed, Saffron and Brimstone is a worthy addition to an outstanding career.

Saffron and Brimstone

We’ve been living through a renaissance of science fiction and fantasy short fiction in the past decade. New authors are entering the field through the monthly magazines both online and in print. Small presses are also producing excellent work: Small Beer Press, Night Shade Books, and Golden Gryphon among them.

I’d not previously heard of M Press, but if it is a new entry into the small press arena, I’m happy to welcome it, especially if it continues to publish books as strange and brilliant as Elizabeth Hand’s Saffron and Brimstone. This collection of mostly longer pieces is as evocative as its cover photograph of a butterfly in extreme close-up. Most of the stories make one’s skin creep, even as one revels in Hand’s language and characters. All of them, in one way or another, are about transformation, about becoming. They are about change and how people cause it, embrace it, reject it, or all three.

The opening story, “Cleopatra Brimstone,” is about Jane, who loves and studies butterflies from her earliest childhood. When she reaches puberty, three hairs on each of her eyebrows, at the inner edge above the bridge of her nose, grow very long and entwine in a braid. She plucks them out, and they don’t grow back — at least not for years. In the meantime, she grows into a remarkable beauty working with shark moths at her women’s college. In fact, her college is populated by many studious beauties. When she takes a shortcut home from the Zoology Lab one late night, Jane is raped.

In the aftermath of this hideous experience, Jane accepts an invitation to go to London to house-sit for some family friends. That’s where the plot really starts to unfurl. The London house seems to be a sort of cocoon for Jane, who undergoes a metamorphosis of a kind hardly to be understood. Part Kafka, part fairy tale, part horror story, “Cleopatra Brimstone” is a story that haunts the reader long after she has finished the tale.

“Pavane for a Prince of the Air” is equally haunting. Whether it contains the slightest amount of fantasy in it is for the reader to decide, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that this picture of illness, death and mourning of the narrator’s good friend seems to convey feelings and thoughts about the end of life more effectively than just about any other literary writing will do. There is nothing maudlin about this story, but there is much beauty and mystery. Little truly happens except for the man’s illness and death, and his family and friends’ mourning him. It is very difficult for me to identify a favorite story in this collection, but this one speaks most directly to me, with its approach to loss as change rather than pure sorrow.

“The Least Trumps” is the story of Ivy, a tattoo artist who is the daughter — and subject — of a long and very successful series of children’s books. She lives in a small house on a tiny island that is itself part of an island off the coast of Maine. The house is eccentric, small and lonely but very appealing, and Ivy rarely leaves. On one of her few trips across the water to the mainland, Ivy finds a pack of mysterious tarot cards at a church rummage sale. The cards launch Ivy on a path of discovery, about herself, about her world – and to wreak change in a seemingly static life.

Hand calls her last four stories “story variations,” but to my mind they do not share a theme as closely as do the first three stories. Though they are all intended to be contemporary stories about the nymphs of ancient mythology, they have little else in common. The standout in this group of four is “Calypso in Berlin,” about the nymph who captured Odysseus centuries ago, and is again the mistress of a married man, a traveler, in the present day. Calypso is an artist, and she compulsively sketches and paints her lover. He forbids her to show her work, even though her studies of him would likely make her reputation. She fears he will leave her, not as much because of their emotional bond, it seems, as because she is obsessed with him as a model. Another tale of transformation follows, as Calypso changes her lover and refines her art. It is a melancholy story, evoking autumn and its crisp, clear, blue days with a hint of winter in the air.

This book belongs on the shelf of everyone who loves literate, unusual, extremely well-written fantasy. But beware: if you are as much a lover of Elizabeth Hand’s work as I am, you may already own the bulk of this book. Bibliomancy, published in a limited edition by PS Publishing in 2003, contains “Cleopatra Brimstone,” “Pavane for a Prince of the Air,” and “The Least Trumps.” I’m personally pleased to own both volumes, as Bibliomancy contains another novella, “Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol,” which isn’t available elsewhere in book form, while Saffron and Brimstone contains “Wonderwall” and “The Lost Domain: Four Story Variations” (of which “Calypso in Berlin” is one). —Terry Weyna

The Bride of Frankenstein — (2007) Publisher: Attempting to create life through dreadful experiments, Henry Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius instead created unspeakable horror: two misshapen monsters, a brutish male and his female mate, stitched together from the bodies of cadavers. Crafted to be the monster's bride — an undead Eve to an equally accursed Adam — the female creature was destroyed mere minutes after taking its first breath — or was it? This new novel by the critically acclaimed Elizabeth Hand reinterprets the memorable characters from Universal Picture's classic 1935 film for a new generation of horror fans. Detailing the bride of Frankenstein's secret history, from the shadows of forgotten laboratories to the streets of Weimar Germany, Hand creates a richly atmospheric tale of horror, mystery, and tragedy as chilling as the creature itself. Elizabeth Hand's novels and short story collections include Mortal Love, Black Light, Bibliomancy and the cult classic Waking the Moon. A longtime contributor to the Washington Post Book World and the Village Voice Literary Supplement, she lives in Maine.

Generation Loss — (2008) Publisher: Cass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But 30 years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption.

Generation Loss

Some books simply ensnare you in the first few chapters, and that’s what happened to me when I picked up Generation Loss.

First is our protagonist, someone who, in the hands of a different writer, would be painted as pathetic and pitiful. Yet she's compelling and one easily falls in love with her despite all her faults — the rebellious girl you know you should avoid but can't help feeling attracted to.

Then there's the tone. Elizabeth Hand successfully conjures the ‘70s punk scene — something of which I’m ignorant yet, when Hand writes about it, it not only sounds authentic but actually feels familiar. This is compounded by the heroine's passion for photography and through a combination of details and apt metaphors that are consistent throughout Generation Loss, one has an anchor to tie the narrative and the title to.

Setting is another powerful tool in Hand's arsenal. One can feel the chill and the gloominess of the atmosphere, as if it's a forgotten memory rather than a fabricated vista. There are a lot of dark themes and motifs tackled in Generation Loss and this is not a clear-cut story of redemption. That would be too easy.

Perhaps the highlight for me is Hand's characterization. Her protagonist remains faithful to herself, all the while skirting the life of an actual rebel. There are no apologies, simply choosing the best course of action at the time. There's a certain romance in her tragedy and the Elizabeth Hand nurtures this aspect, giving readers an incentive to stay for the entire ride.

Generation Loss definitely impressed me, a book that hooks you and drowns you with its many layers. Whether it's technique or overall impact, Hand succeeds on both counts.
—Charles Tan (guest)    
FanLit thanks Charles Tan from Bibliophile Stalker for contributing this guest review.

Illyria — (2010) Young adult. Publisher: Madeleine and Rogan are first cousins, best friends, twinned souls, each other’s first love. Even within their large, disorderly family — all descendants of a famous actress — their intensity and passion for theater sets them apart. It makes them a little dangerous. When they are cast in their school’s production of Twelfth Night, they are forced to face their separate talents and futures, and their future together. This masterful short novel, winner of the World Fantasy Award, is magic on paper.