Five minutes into what was supposed to be a reread of Hard Light I was convinced that I had not, in fact, read it. After a few more chapters it slowly dawned on me that yes, I most likely had read it, but that realization was not accompanied by the story rushing back in sharp detail. Instead I was left with the unsettling feeling of memory lining up with the words on the page as I read them, not unlike a ground-glass viewfinder snapping into focus in a manual SLR camera.
The story that Cass Neary stumbles into is a collision of the things that have propelled the series so far: drugs, music, and damage handed down from generation to generation1. I can’t wait to finally sink into the latest installment, The Book of Lamps and Banners.
Even after I’d established that I’d read Hard Light, I kept mixing up parts of the story with Marisha Pessl’s Night Film, which also deals with a cult film and family secrets. ↩︎