Before we take a look at Craig Laurance Gidney’s upcoming novel A Spectral Hue, I should mention that there is an ongoing Storybundle focusing on queer fantasy where you can get not one, but two of Gidney’s short story collections (I reviewed one of them earlier), and also Transcendent 3, and a Glittership book, and, and!! Even more! Check it out 🙂

A Spectral Hue by Craig Laurance Gidney. Word Horde, 2019.

A Spectral Hue is Craig Laurance Gidney’s debut adult novel – he has had a YA novel earlier, and two short story collections, one of which has just been reissued with a new cover (and I think also a newly typeset interior). I periodically run around to tell people about him, because I think he is one of the more underappreciated SFF writers out there. He writes unapologetically queer and Black stories, with a horror-dark fantasy-Weird ambience, and this is also what we get in A Spectral Hue, except at novel length (finally!!).

This book is short – my print ARC is just a bit over 200 pages long. And yet it has a complexity and richness that belies this length: there are multiple points of view across different historical eras, and a carefully detailed background featuring an entire fictional art movement.

The story focuses on the fictional town of Shimmer, Maryland, where a movement of self-taught Black artists developed over time. Xavier is a young hipster somewhat out of his element in the small town, where he has just arrived to work on his master’s thesis in art history. He rents an AirBnB from Iris, a woman whose past ties her to the artists Xavier is intent on studying. Linc is a drifter trying to find a job, something, anything in Shimmer… even if it’s in a haunted museum. And Fuchsia… Fuchsia has been around for generations. The life-threads of this all-Black and very queer cast tangle together to form a quilt not unlike the artworks Xavier researches.

There is a tiny subgenre of Weird fiction focusing on artwork, and its effects on people. I love this subgenre, and I think it works best with approaches that are more beguiling and enticing than brutally horrific (though I’ve also seen the latter done convincingly). A Spectral Hue is more dark fantasy than horror – certainly many aspects of horror are present, and the past of Shimmer is rooted in slavery, but the overarching ambience of the story is more languid and beatiful than stark and terrifying, despite the presence of supernatural creatures and happenings. I also liked how a certain purplish color, the titular spectral hue pulled all the themes together. (In this sense it reminded me of another Weird story that stayed with me throughout the years, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Flash Frame which does this with the color yellow, and film rather than art objects.)

Some of my favorite scenes were related to how magic and tradition interacted. While the mysteries of the art reveal themselves to the Black cast and draw them in in almost hypnotic ways, most white visitors to the museum dismiss the works as weird folklore, primitive and idiosyncratic, more craft than art. There is a white museum staff member who Xavier thinks of as a “paranormal activity retardant”, who knows endless factual details about the art, but who not only stops any mysterious events from happening, but is also entirely oblivious to doing so. Yet throughout the history of the place, are also white people like the Ogress, an elderly, disabled Scottish woman who knows the power of magical places still. She is not rootless; she is Scottish, from a place with its own marshland tradition. But she is a character from the past, not the present. There are a plethora of fascinating parallels here, and no absolution: the Ogress is still one of the “pink demons,” even if “the nicest.”

Overall, the depictions of spirituality and its interrelationships with art pulled me in, and the fictional art movement with its many artists was tangible for me to the extent of giving me chest pangs longing to see the art. (I do think I have seen the art.) As a non-Black person who is from a whole another continent, I felt honored that I had been allowed entry into the world of this spellbinding book, and the roots of it that went deep into the salt marshes. There was love, beauty, passion, family both blood and found, different pathways to queerness, obsession with creation, drugs, hauntings and passion. Death, slavery, the Middle Passage, and visions of the marshland. The home that we find in each other, and that someone else maybe finds through us.

There was the occasional turn of phrase I would have done differently – for instance, I was worried that the Ogress’ depiction would focus overmuch on her physical differences of being disabled and fat, and I wasn’t entirely convinced. I read an advance copy, so I’m hesitant to focus on specifics. In any case, all my issues with the book were along the lines of what can be changed with a line edit. (I feel like I’ve been saying this a lot lately.)

I would like more and more books like this, so I hope Craig Laurance Gidney will keep on writing. I’ll keep on reading! In the meanwhile, you can preorder this novel or get his short fiction collections on Storybundle.

You can also preorder on Amazon (associate link):

Disclosures: I’ve briefly interacted with the author on social media, but we don’t know each other closely. I got a print ARC from the publisher after requesting it.