Elizabeth Hand is the author of twenty multiple-award-winning novels and six collections of short fiction. She is a longtime reviewer for numerous publications, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her noir novels featuring punk photographer Cass Neary have been compared to the work of Patricia Highsmith and are being developed for aUK TV series. Her most recent novel, A Haunting on the Hill, is the first book authorized by Shirley Jackson's estate to be set in Jackson's iconic Hill House. Hand teaches at the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and divides her time between the Maine coast and North London.

Glimmering by Elizabeth Hand

Author of Hokuloa Road, a New York Times Notable Book

Recipient of three World Fantasy Awards, three Shirley Jackson Awards, and two Nebula Awards, along with the James M. Tiptree Award (now the Otherwise Award).

"If Stephen King set out to rewrite The Waste Land as a novel, the result might resemble Glimmering." —The Washington Post

Climate change, rampant viruses, blackouts, fundamentalists—the end of the end has arrived. Glimmering, the 1994 dystopian novel by Nebula and World Fantasy Award–winning author Elizabeth Hand, is now timelier than ever.

When the confluence of a solar storm and the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf ignites the atmosphere like grease, those who are able hide behind their walls and masks, seeking the promise of a seductive—and dangerous—future. As the earth erupts in flames, department store heir and editor Jack Finnegan faces his own inevitable death from AIDS in his family's decrepit mansion near the Hudson River—that is, until an old friend offers him a miraculous cure . . .

Christian singer Trip Marlowe has found worldwide success, but the dynamic rock star retains his strict morality and faith. Temptation comes in the form of a mysterious blond waif and IZE, a new drug more addictive than crack and heroin . . .

The two men will find themselves on a bizarre collision course as a dark and powerful force seeks to shape what's left of humanity's consciousness.

CURATOR'S NOTE

•This is Elizabeth's third appearance in the current series of weird fiction StoryBundles, with good reason. Her work epitomizes the modern weird genre, reinventing its tropes and altering its essence for contemporary readers. She is a true craftsman, not only of weird fiction, but writing in general. Glimmering is yet another example of the excellence she brings to all her work, this time exploring the apocalyptic side of Weird. By the time you finish this book, you will be stunned at Elizabeth's staggering talent…and utterly caught up in the twisty, shocking story of two men seeking deliverance amid the challenges of the end of the world. The characters are as captivating as the surprising narrative and layers of emotional resonance, all of it memorable in the way that the best weird fiction—the best fiction, period—always is. – Robert Jeschonek

 

REVIEWS

  • "A brutal vision of Apocalypse . . . Hand's powerful vision of these days of wrath is not so much a protracted self-pitying whisper as a Nietzschean insistence on salvation through creative evolution."

    – Publishers Weekly, starred review

  • "[A] wild, psychedelic, thoughtful thriller . . . Another dynamite read!"

    – The Des Moines Register

  • "If Stephen King set out to rewrite The Waste Land as a novel, the result might resemble Glimmering."

    – The Washington Post
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

"Afterward he would think, We should have known it was coming. Should have seen it in the fiery darkness above the Palisades, or traced it in the flaming contrails left by disintegrating jets as they plunged into that watery cleft between the Battery and Liberty Island. Fingerprints upon a windowpane, etched in August ice; crocuses blooming in December, then November; peepers waking in the February mud to sing, too early by far, to sing again next spring, and then never to wake again.

We should have known, I should have known, he thought, a hole in the sky, the fabric of the world rent, and we the living should have known what would stream through that shimmering gap, we should have remembered before they returned to remind us: we the dying at the end of the world should never have forgotten the dead."