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Description
Lit
Pen, ink &

Watercolor

7"x9 ¾"

A portrait of the main character from Elizabeth Hand's novel "Black Light", the audacious and playfully malicious follow-up to her masterpiece "Waking the Moon" (fans of that book will surely be delighted to find themselves once again in the raffish company of Balthazar Warnick). It reads at times like a crazed, sexed-up "Alice in Wonderland"; at other times, you'll think it's a lost "Buffy" episode.

Set back in the drug- and sex-crazed early 1970s, the book, crammed with Jungian references that won't scare you off, tells the story of Charlotte (Lit) Moylan, at the turning point between adolescence and womanhood, as she slides and glides her way through a most unusual Hallowe'en party held at a properly mysterious mansion (it's the centerpiece of an up-state suburban New York town) presided over by a renegade film-maker, who happens to be Lit's godfather. Hand turns the gothic mansion, with its hidden passages and its motley crew of guests, into a symbol of the deteriorating era in which the book is set. And during the course of one long night Lit not only turns the corner into adulthood, but also transforms herself from used to user.

Terrifyingly terrific, superbly written, Hand's genre transcending novel is best read in late autumn, with The Velvet Underground's 'White Light/White Heat' turned up and the lights turned down.

She reminds me, as so many of her lead female characters do, of an echo of those in her other stories; Sweeney from "Waking The Moon", Wendy Wanders from the "Winterlong" cycle, even Keeley from "The Glimmering"- echoes of a theme.

As for the piece, well, the images all come, more or less, from the story. The skeleton was influenced by some Mike Mignola illustrations for a collection of short stories from White Wolf's 'World of Darkness' line.

The background is one of my most favorite I've ever painted.

Description
Lit
Pen, ink &

Watercolor

7"x9 ¾"

A portrait of the main character from Elizabeth Hand's novel "Black Light", the audacious and playfully malicious follow-up to her masterpiece "Waking the Moon" (fans of that book will surely be delighted to find themselves once again in the raffish company of Balthazar Warnick). It reads at times like a crazed, sexed-up "Alice in Wonderland"; at other times, you'll think it's a lost "Buffy" episode.

Set back in the drug- and sex-crazed early 1970s, the book, crammed with Jungian references that won't scare you off, tells the story of Charlotte (Lit) Moylan, at the turning point between adolescence and womanhood, as she slides and glides her way through a most unusual Hallowe'en party held at a properly mysterious mansion (it's the centerpiece of an up-state suburban New York town) presided over by a renegade film-maker, who happens to be Lit's godfather. Hand turns the gothic mansion, with its hidden passages and its motley crew of guests, into a symbol of the deteriorating era in which the book is set. And during the course of one long night Lit not only turns the corner into adulthood, but also transforms herself from used to user.

Terrifyingly terrific, superbly written, Hand's genre transcending novel is best read in late autumn, with The Velvet Underground's 'White Light/White Heat' turned up and the lights turned down.

She reminds me, as so many of her lead female characters do, of an echo of those in her other stories; Sweeney from "Waking The Moon", Wendy Wanders from the "Winterlong" cycle, even Keeley from "The Glimmering"- echoes of a theme.

As for the piece, well, the images all come, more or less, from the story. The skeleton was influenced by some Mike Mignola illustrations for a collection of short stories from White Wolf's 'World of Darkness' line.

The background is one of my most favorite I've ever painted.