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Cass Neary #4 - The Book of Lamps and Banners (Elizabeth Hand)
This is the fourth Cass Neary book and (so far) the last in the series, which I binged over a month or so. Withdrawal pangs are coming on, so if anyone has recs for other character-driven mysteries with not-exactly-likable but compelling narrators, please feel free to send them my way! Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt series seems to give off that kind of vibe--maybe I'll go there next.
After the events of Hard Light, Cass is lying low in London with no plans beyond avoiding the police and tracking down Quinn, a convict and ex-boyfriend. She wanders into an occult bookshop and crosses paths with Gryffin Haselton, who first showed up in Generation Loss. Gryffin, a rare books dealer, is about to close the deal of a lifetime by selling a manuscript a friend of his--now dead--picked up in Baghdad.
This manuscript is the only existing copy of a legendary occult text, The Book of Lamps and Banners. Since Gryffin has bad judgement and a thing for Cass, he asks her to tag along, and the two end up having sex on the floor of another rare books dealer's pantry. When they remerge, the other dealer is shot through the eye, and the manuscript has disappeared.
Like all the other Cass books, this one is addictively readable and incredibly creepy in an understated, maybe it's cosmic horror, maybe it's paranoia and a whole bunch of drugs kind of way. In Hard Light, Cass encounters a movie that's possibly evil (it makes people sick, not with its imagery but with some kind of wrongness seeping out of it). The Book of Lamps and Banners has a possibly evil manuscript and a definitely evil app/code inspired by that manuscript.
The app can unlock people's worst memories and also drive them into a Viking-berserker-type frenzy; Cass is "lucky" enough to only get the unlocking your worst memory treatment. By the end of the book, she is finally ready to at least try to move past her trauma, but even if the app helped her decision along it's still dangerous at best and malevolent at worst.
The series is really good about taking mundane horrors (like apps knowing more than they should) and pushing them that one step further. I'm on the yes cosmic horror bandwagon for most of the creepy stuff Cass runs into (and most of the creepy stuff she believes about herself), but either way you go, she's not an especially reliable or sympathetic narrator. As in the other books, she makes a bunch of illegal and/or immoral choices that pull her even deeper into the mystery, but as always she's clear-eyed and very passionate about a very select number of things. I love being in her head--I just wouldn't love being with her.
As a bonus, this book is also set partly on the Finnish island of Kälkö, which, per all the settings in the Cass Neary books, is a touristy area rendered eerie and dreary--maybe because it actually is, maybe because we're seeing it through Cass's eyes. There are a couple neat callbacks to the Norse mythology elements in Available Dark: Cass as a Valkyrie, carrying the dead with her, Cass as Odin (there's a bunch of increasingly eerie eye imagery woven through the whole series).
Oh, and there's also a grossout that grossed me out like no grossout has ever before. Predictably, it barely slows Cass down at all.
After the events of Hard Light, Cass is lying low in London with no plans beyond avoiding the police and tracking down Quinn, a convict and ex-boyfriend. She wanders into an occult bookshop and crosses paths with Gryffin Haselton, who first showed up in Generation Loss. Gryffin, a rare books dealer, is about to close the deal of a lifetime by selling a manuscript a friend of his--now dead--picked up in Baghdad.
This manuscript is the only existing copy of a legendary occult text, The Book of Lamps and Banners. Since Gryffin has bad judgement and a thing for Cass, he asks her to tag along, and the two end up having sex on the floor of another rare books dealer's pantry. When they remerge, the other dealer is shot through the eye, and the manuscript has disappeared.
Like all the other Cass books, this one is addictively readable and incredibly creepy in an understated, maybe it's cosmic horror, maybe it's paranoia and a whole bunch of drugs kind of way. In Hard Light, Cass encounters a movie that's possibly evil (it makes people sick, not with its imagery but with some kind of wrongness seeping out of it). The Book of Lamps and Banners has a possibly evil manuscript and a definitely evil app/code inspired by that manuscript.
The app can unlock people's worst memories and also drive them into a Viking-berserker-type frenzy; Cass is "lucky" enough to only get the unlocking your worst memory treatment. By the end of the book, she is finally ready to at least try to move past her trauma, but even if the app helped her decision along it's still dangerous at best and malevolent at worst.
The series is really good about taking mundane horrors (like apps knowing more than they should) and pushing them that one step further. I'm on the yes cosmic horror bandwagon for most of the creepy stuff Cass runs into (and most of the creepy stuff she believes about herself), but either way you go, she's not an especially reliable or sympathetic narrator. As in the other books, she makes a bunch of illegal and/or immoral choices that pull her even deeper into the mystery, but as always she's clear-eyed and very passionate about a very select number of things. I love being in her head--I just wouldn't love being with her.
As a bonus, this book is also set partly on the Finnish island of Kälkö, which, per all the settings in the Cass Neary books, is a touristy area rendered eerie and dreary--maybe because it actually is, maybe because we're seeing it through Cass's eyes. There are a couple neat callbacks to the Norse mythology elements in Available Dark: Cass as a Valkyrie, carrying the dead with her, Cass as Odin (there's a bunch of increasingly eerie eye imagery woven through the whole series).
Oh, and there's also a grossout that grossed me out like no grossout has ever before. Predictably, it barely slows Cass down at all.
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Like all the other Cass books, this one is addictively readable and incredibly creepy in an understated, maybe it's cosmic horror, maybe it's paranoia and a whole bunch of drugs kind of way.
Perfect description of the vibe of these books.
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It's such a specific vibe! I'd love to find more mystery or crime books with a little bit of the same "not quite supernatural horror but also not not supernatural horror" feel to them, since it worked so well for me with these books.
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