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    Available Dark: A Crime Novel
    Unavailable
    Available Dark: A Crime Novel
    Unavailable
    Available Dark: A Crime Novel
    Ebook245 pages3 hours

    Available Dark: A Crime Novel

    By Elizabeth Hand

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "A skin-blistering crime novel, as edgy and black as dried blood on a moonlit night."

    --Robert Crais

    Elizabeth Hand's writing honors include the Shirley Jackson Award, the James Tiptree Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and many others. Now, this uniquely gifted storyteller brings us a searing and iconoclastic crime novel, in which photographer Cass Neary, introduced in the underground classic Generation Loss, finds herself drawn into the shadowy world of crime in Scandinavia's coldest corners.

    As this riveting tour-de-force opens, the police already want to talk to Cass about a mysterious death she was involved with previously, but before they can bring her in, Cass accepts a job offer from overseas and hops on a plane.

    In Helsinki, she authenticates a series of disturbing but stunning images taken by a famous fashion photographer who has cut himself off from the violent Nordic music scene where he first made his reputation. Paid off by her shady employer, she buys a one-way ticket to Reykjavik, in search of a lover from her own dark past.


    But when the fashion photographer's mutilated corpse is discovered back in Finland, Cass finds herself sucked into a vortex of ancient myth and betrayal, vengeance and serial murder, set against a bone-splintering soundtrack of black metal and the terrifying beauty of the sunless Icelandic wilderness. In this eagerly awaited sequel to the award-winning Generation Loss, Cass Neary finds her own worst fears confirmed: it's always darkest before it turns completely black.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateFeb 14, 2012
    ISBN9781429950411
    Unavailable
    Available Dark: A Crime Novel
    Author

    Elizabeth Hand

    Elizabeth Hand is the author of sixteen 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 optioned for a TV series. Hand teaches at the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and, when not living under pandemic conditions, divides her time between the Maine coast and North London.

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    Reviews for Available Dark

    3.5/5

    68 ratings10 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is the second of a trilogy, preceded by Generation Loss and followed by Hard Light. I’ve not read the first – the paperback is already out of print in the UK. Available Dark does refer to the events of Generation Loss, but it’s not necessary to have read it. Briefly, in the first book cult photographer Cassie Neary was involved in the murder of another photographer, close enough that she’d be behind bars if her true role were known. At least, that’s how Available Dark presents the events of Generation Loss. Neary has been in an artistic slump for years and is best known for a single book published years earlier. Neary specialises in photographs of dead people – the story throws around names like Joel-Peter Witkin and WeeGee – and it’s because of that she’s offered a job by a shady Norwegian character. He wants her to go to Helsinki to view a series of six photos by a famous Finnish fashion photographer. The Finnish photographer was once also into death photography, and the series depicts victims in bizarre murders. Coincidentally, Neary has received a mysterious message from a past lover she had thought long dead. And he’s in Reykjavík. After telling the Norwegian the photos are worth buying, Neary heads to Iceland to track down her old boyfriend. Then the Finnish photographer and his assistant are brutally murdered, and it’s all to do with the Jólasveinar, or Yule Lads, grim Icelandic troll-like figures who were used to scare children, Nordic black metal in the 1990s, the member of one of those bands called Galdur who now lives out in the Icelandic wilderness, his band’s only, and incredibly rare, album, and events in Oslo back in the 1990s at the aforementioned Norwegian’s metal club. And, of course, the series of six photographs. An ignorant puff on the back of the book confuses black metal and death metal – they’re different genres – but Hand has a good, er, handle on the music. Neary, however, is a little too good to be true, a little too much of the sort of unkillable drug addict hard case you’d find in an urban fantasy rather than a realistic crime novel. The Reykjavík of 2012 also apparently bears little resemblance to the Reykjavík I visited in 2016, or even in 2018 (though, to be fair, I saw a number of changes between my two visits). Available Dark started out well enough, a slightly off-kilter thriller about death photography and Norwegian black metal, but the character of Neary sort of ruined it. She was too good to be true, too tough to be realistic. And it all hung on a series of murders from the 1990s that seemed unlikely to have gone undetected. I’ve always preferred novels about female detectives to those about male ones, but Available Dark, while structured like a crime novel, felt more like an urban fantasy.
    • 4/5
      Trying to evade trouble she stirred up in Maine (in the novel Generation Loss), Cass Neary accepts a shady job to evaluate some photographs of questionable subject matter in Finland. Just before she is about to leave, she receives from Iceland a photo she took of a long-ago boyfriend, so she goes there next to track him down. And then the murders begin.As in Generation Loss, this sequel puts Cass in an isolated, desolate setting, the exterior landscape reflecting the interior character. However, this novel is different in tone: less gothic, more noir, with a touch of the weird as it relates to Norse mythology. The writing is good and carries the reader along, Cass is still an intriguing antihero of a character, but the mystery is more straightforward and less surprising here, although some of the business related to Odinists and heavy metal music lost me. I've enjoyed these two thrillers and will probably get around to reading the last in the trilogy.
    • 2/5
      My 2 star rating of Available Dark" is probably not fair. It's the first Elizabeth Hand book I have read and perhaps all of her books dwell on similar themes and story lines - very noir, Finland and Iceland in the winter (how much darker can you get?), vinyl recordings of heavy metal back to its earliest days, gruesome photos of dead people, and some equally gruesome violence in the story. There are some readers who will really appreciate Hand's skills and/or who have an interest in such photos and music; I am not one of them and regret having read this. This is not a book to be bought on a whim nor if you are into more traditional crime fiction. Research thoroughly before committing your money and time.
    • 5/5
      I can't remember what I input, but whichbook.net suggested I would enjoy this. Since I am a fan of Scandinavian crime novels, and the intersection of Scandinavian metal with galdr is of great interest to me, I bought a copy. I was immediately captivated, and although much was quite implausible and the ending outrageously over-the-top, I loved it! I am so curious now as to how/why the author came to focus on this particular topic, and whether my suspicions about who a certain character was based on are correct, that I am off to look for any interviews or FAQ pages.
    • 4/5
      This is, except in its villain, is a more satisfying novel than its predecessor, Generation Loss.There are more bodies, a trail of them across the northern lands of Finland and Iceland, as Cass Neary, leaving her New York City home before Maine law enforcement can question her more closely about events in the earlier novel, accepts a dodgy commission by a sinister Norwegian nightclub owner. He wants some “esoteric” photographic prints authenticated. They turn out to be beautifully composed crime scene photos, the secret, early art of a now famous fashion photographer.There’s more weirdness as Cass seems, as the novel progresses, to be more than just a “amoral speedfreak crankhead kleptomaniac murderous rage-filled alcoholic bisexual heavily-tattooed” photographer of the damaged, dead, and dying. She has a wyrd and a purpose.No American hippies here cooking up their homemade occultism in a Maine commune. The menace and mystery of the novel is both more ancient but also more modern as Hand shows Scandinavians trying, with murder, music, drugs, and desperation to come to grips with old and new chaos brought to their land by foreigners. In an Iceland reeling from the black swans of economic derivatives (though there are no scenes with the Viking Squad), Hand gives us bleak beauty (and a chance for Cass to put her practical knowledge of street drugs to good use).To top it off, Cass hears, for the first time in over thirty years, from her old boyfriend, Quinn. He was the center of numinous attraction for the teenaged Cass. The back story of her relationship with Quinn is one of the reasons I’d advise reading Generation Loss first though it’s not absolutely required.Definitely recommended for those who like their crime stories mixed with something unearthly.
    • 4/5
      While still hugely dark and gritty, I don't think this was as raw as Generation Loss. (Which I'm okay with, honestly. Generation Loss fucked me up for a week.) I'm not sure if it's the book, though, or the fact that I'm familiar enough with Odinist death metal symbolism to be pretty unsurprised by almost everything that turned out happening?...
    • 4/5
      What is it about Cass Neary that fascinates me? If I knew her we would not be friends. I wouldn’t even want her at a party. She’s a liar and a thief. A manipulator and an addict. She sees in darkness instead of in light. She values pleasure, but only if its price is pain. A twisted freak, basically. But an engaging one.Having just come from the abattoir that was her trip to Maine, Cass is desperate to keep herself together and the cops off her back. She receives an invitation to do some consulting in Finland and while there decides to go find her old lover who has recently sent a photo of himself that she took 30 years before. As in Generation Loss, Cass’s own penumbra of grit and despair attracts like and she’s down, down, down into a whirlpool of black metal, death photography, neolithic rituals and killing. I think the plot in this one is more deliberately evil than in the last. It feels heavier and more directly aimed at Cass even though she’s an accidental victim...a victim by propinquity.Like in G.L., Hand’s writing conveys Cass’s inner landscape very well. Shards. Razoring through any and all thoughts she has, shredding them so that Cass has to piece them together again. There’s nothing cohesive about Cass. She’s in pieces. None of them work harmoniously. Her only goal is to stay medicated enough to stay numb to them. She’s her own worst enemy, but eerily indestructible. She takes abuse like no one else because I think she needs it. I think she thinks that’s the only real contact she deserves. I’m anxiously awaiting our next meeting.
    • 5/5
      In Available Dark, Elizabeth continues the journey begun in Generation Loss. Her protagonist, Cass Neary, avoiding the authorities who want to question her about a death in Maine, now finds herself landing a job identifying some obscure photographs from the Black Metal world in Finland. She is barely in Finland long enough to do the job before she goes to Iceland to locate a lover from her youth. And then it begins to get strange. Everywhere Cass goes, bodies are left behind and strange photographs await her arrival, with Finnish black metal as the soundtrack.
    • 4/5
      Fresh on the heels of deaths in Maine and not wanting to handle uncomfortable questions about them, Cass Neary accepts a job now sending her to Finland to examine photos by a prominent photographer. Death continues to follow Cass through these images... then through the gruesome murder of the photographer and his assistant. By this time she has arrived in Iceland in pursuit of another mystery: receiving a photo of her youthful love. Her time in Iceland quickly comes to link back to Finland, with a view into the Black metal scene of the early 1990s, punk photos, and trying to stay alive.Hand continues to weave a compelling story, with a strung out, has-been photographer of a protagonist who is, as her tattoo says, too tough to die.
    • 4/5
      Available Dark continues the adventures of Cass Neary from Generation Loss and retains a lot of the qualities that made the first books so great: a fascinating protagonist, a rich and highly visual, yet economical prose that combines the to-the-point-ness of the hardboiled school with a sense for detail and beauty influenced from the visual arts. Also, Hand still has that incredible gift of communicating the sense of a place that goes beyond mere visuals - she somehow evokes a mood, or mindset that really draws you in.Unfortunatly, the thriller and crime aspects drags somewhat this time. It alls feels a bit happenstance and vague, with Cass most of the time merely reacting to things she happen to stumble upon and actually doing very little on her own to advance the plot. A lot seem to hinge on circumstance or the machinatons of others, whose motives never become quite clear and sometimes seem a bit too convenient. The characters ar just as cool and colorful as in the last novel, but this time they seem more... cartoonish is maye to strong a word, but they're definitly not as fleshed out and belivable as the locals in Generation LossThe main mystery plot, with it's connections to nordic revivalism, black metal, art, serial killings, and strane occult underground doings is exiting, but in the end it all falls a bit flat - problably in part because it's all really just explaing through other characters monologues . Cass is never really there to observe, comment or react to it.I might come of as more critical than I intend to. The book is really very good, and most of what I've done here is really nitpicking. It's just that I really Loved G.L., and this din't quite live up to it's very high level. But it's a very worthwhile read nevertheless.