A Spectral Hue

by Craig Laurance Gidney

For generations, the marsh-surrounded town of Shimmer, Maryland has played host to a loose movement of African-American artists, all working in different media, but all utilizing the same haunting color. Landscape paintings, trompe l'oeil quilts, decorated dolls, mixed-media assemblages, and more, all featuring the same peculiar hue, a shifting pigment somewhere between purple and pink, the color of the saltmarsh orchid, a rare and indigenous flower.

Graduate student Xavier Wentworth has been drawn to Shimmer, hoping to study the work of artists like quilter Hazel Whitby and landscape painter Shadrach Grayson in detail, having experienced something akin to an epiphany when viewing a Hazel Whitby tapestry as a child. Xavier will find that others, too, have been drawn to Shimmer, called by something more than art, something in the marsh itself, a mysterious, spectral hue.

From Lambda Literary Award-nominated author Craig Laurance Gidney (Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories, Skin Deep Magic) comes A Spectral Hue, a novel of art, obsession, and the ghosts that haunt us all.

Genres: Horror, Fantasy, Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Magical Realism, Speculative Fiction

177 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 18, 2019

About the author

Author of SEA, SWALLOW ME & OTHER STORIES (Lethe Press) ;BEREFT (Tiny Satchel Press), . SKIN DEEP MAGIC (Rebel Satori Press), THE NECTAR OF NIGHTMARES (Dim Shores Publications); A SPECTRAL HUE (Word Horde). Plus numerous short stories. 3-Time Lambda Literary Award Finalist. NPR’s recommended books of 2019. Current novel, HAIRSBREADTH, is being serialized.

Reviews

[K.J. Charles]

Absolutely stunning. A ghost story, meditation on inspiration, and slide back and forth through the US's bitter history.

The salt-marsh town of Shimmer is haunted by a spirit born out of slavery that demands worship through art and consumes her worshippers. This is not easily summarisable, because the entire point is the tapestry the author builds up, with queer and Black and female voices needing to be heard in a culture that isn't comfortable with colour and stifles life. Just read it, basically.

Really, really good, beautifully written, magical, inspiring and haunting. I love this.

[Bogi Takács]

Loved this. Quiet, richly textured historical dark fantasy / Weird fiction, with a lot of crossover appeal to non-genre readers. Ownvoices queer Black novel. Longer review next week IY"H, I just want to quickly update my Goodreads with stuff I read over the last two days of Passover.

Update: I wrote my longer review!
http://www.bogireadstheworld.com/nove...

Update2: I reread the book and it is still awesome.
_______
Source of the book: Print ARC from the publisher

[Sadie Hartmann]

It's challenging to try and pin any solid genre labels on this debut novel from Craig Laurance Gidney. There are elements of magical realism, fantasy, and horror. At its core, an ancestral ghost story but swirling around this core, intimate and lyrically expressed themes of queerness, race, identity, and this gravitational, historical beauty surrounding all of it known as the spectral hue.
Gidney gives a voice to so many underrepresented communities of people all woven together to create a cohesive work of art. Truly an inspired work of fiction.

[Sam Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so fantastic. Dark and scary and sexy and exciting and beautiful and just all-around wonderful.

[Teacup · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting, spellbinding, very very queer and very very Black. Also, I would argue, fairly neurodivergent. Or at least read that way by me.

I loved all the POV characters immediately and worried about bad things happening to them, knowing that this was "dark fantasy".

This novel brings together not only various character perspectives and timelines, but also such themes as the fine line between artistic inspiration and all-consuming obsession, the role of artistic expression in putting ghosts and intergenerational trauma to rest, Western academia/art criticism's disdain for "crafts" and forms of art engaged in primarily by women and people of color, the generations-long wound inflicted by slavery which reaches through time and space to directly affect the lives of Black folks today... All this gets so elegantly tied in with the residents of a small fictional town in Maryland, positioned right between the ocean and a saltwater marsh that is full of life, and of ghosts.

[Beige · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes I ponder the books on my tbr and wonder which ones I'll eventually regret neglecting year after year. Which ones, when finally read, will join that small menagerie of books that suit me oh so well.

A Spectral Hue is one of those, we just clicked. The carefully crafted characters, the slow, slow, slow, quick pace...the fictional artworks Gidney created, the flipping back and forth through the decades and centuries....I thought all of it was beautifully crafted and pieced together, just like the mosaic on the book cover. I know I'll be thinking about those swirling fuschia hues for a long, long time. It's going on my favourite shelf right next to White Tears


Gidney on his inspiration for the book:
"The seed of A Spectral Hue was planted during a college course I took on the Surrealist movement. One of the guest lecturers was a specialist in Outsider Art. I believe he spoke about Henry Darger, the reclusive Chicago janitor who secretly wrote and illustrated an epic science-fantasy novel about child slaves, aliens and the heroic Vivian Girls. I saw slides of his works among other lesser known artists and was blown away by their otherworldly depth. During the summer, when I was staying at my parents’ house, my father, who was a dentist, told me about a patient of his that would give him handmade books of her poetry. He brought one of the books home, and I got the same otherworldly feeling"
https://www.gwendolynkiste.com/Blog/s...

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A paean of a novel, to the inspiration of creativity overcoming oppression. A group of people through time are drawn to a Maryland eastern shore small town, haunted by a creative force that could reveal their full selves. Almost exclusively black and queer characters, from an arts student, a woman that lived through the decades of black and gay liberation, a recovering addict, an enslaved woman, and a slew of artists, are all enraptured by a ghostly personification of purple/pink hue. This transcendent haunt of America’s legacy of racism and homophobia permeates personal connections and the small town natural landscape, that simultaneously enrich and disturb bodies and the souls in them that search for acceptance in our world.

[Carrie Laben · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and wide-open story that is, variously and depending on what you bring to it, about queer people searching for community and belonging; about African-Americans in relationship with a landscape that was forced upon them but that they came to know intimately; about artistic obsession and the fear and ecstasy it inspires, and the way culture seeks to tame and classify it; about the ills of the body and mind and the ways that humans adapt to them, or don't; probably about many other things besides. Like the marsh itself, the work beckons the reader deeper.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm such a sucker for books that capture other arts on the page.

[Brian Hauser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gidney's debut novel is a true delight for someone interested in art, inspiration, and the often forgotten voices who find ways to whisper to us from obscurity. I couldn't help but think that this is a book of particular resonance to readers who are themselves creatives in one way or another, and it really could be any kind of art here. A wonderful #ownvoices story, as well as an excellent sense of place.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had an odd reaction to this book: I wouldn't say I enjoyed it so much as I felt sort of haunted by it. Like it was calling me every time I put it down or thought about reading something else, it was there in my mind, softly whispering me back. I like the way Gidney mixes history, art, horror, and folktales in this book. The jumps in time and perspective worked particularly well. The supernatural and the real were woven impressively together and the multi-layered identities (from sexuality to race and class) added a lot of depth and weight to the story. At times the writing felt a little clunky or forced, but mostly it was rather beautiful and entrancing.

[Jeff Hanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gidney’s most ambitious and confident work yet, building a novel based on the mythology around a fictional group of artists inspired by an otherwordly spirit roaming the swampland around Shimmer, Maryland. Confidently combines issues of race, identity, desire, inspiration, and community in a kaleidoscopic synesthesia of color, emotion and the written word. All while being extremely readable and compelling.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written novel about the legacy of trauma (slavery, Jim Crow and homophobia, in particular) and the search for artistic inspiration and the need to belong. Gidney deftly handles a cast of multiple, mostly queer, characters over shifting time periods, each linked by their attraction to a supernatural entity that inhabits the marshes outside Shimmer, Maryland. She is what drives them
to create as much as she drives them away from normalcy and sanity. My only complaint is that I’d gotten sufficiently attached to the characters that I wanted the ending to be more definitive and less open-ended. But that aside, I think I’ll be thinking about this book for a while. Highly recommended!

[Erika Wurth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a wonderfully weird, lovely experimental horror novel—there’s really no other book like it. If you like horror fiction that utilizes post-modern aesthetics while addressing Black art in America, this is your book.

[Blake Mendoza · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's so hard to rate books that could have been Great, with more editing, but instead are just fine. It's even harder to rate (as a white person) when the book cleverly evades criticism by comparing white art critics to slaveholders. So take my words with as much salt as needed. This is a book about Black American folk art in a marshland town and a haunting spirit that possesses select few people throughout the centuries to create that art. It's a story about trauma, collective memory, shared Black American experience, spirituality, hauntings, and healing through art and gay sex, but despite being comprised of all these wonderful topics, it never quite lifts off. A little more than halfway through, I started getting into it, started to appreciate how all these characters pressed into this narrative in the first half were being transformed into marsh-bells like the flowers in Tamar's collages. I like writing that imitates its subject in its form, and this at least kind of did that. Not as effectively as I personally would have liked.

The #1 main issue with this book is that it is a book about visual art, but putting the visual into words is not the author's strong suit. If you're going to write a book about art, you really need to be able to paint with words. The haunting is done via a color that is "between purple and pink," and the author never once describes this color as anything more imaginative or evocative than "between purple and pink." Give me feeling, tell me what the color tastes like, what emotion it evokes. There's a line at the end: "She saw and heard things the others couldn't. Things like: the sound a color made. Or the taste of a shape." But we never get to read an attempt at describing these things! It's very disappointing. I really craved some lush, ridiculous, unearthly and impractical descriptions of this color. Because why else use words as your medium in the first place? I kept wishing this was a graphic novel, if it wasn't going to evoke feeling using words, which I think is the point of novels. Or if it had been about the shortcoming of words, or the novel as a historically disrespected art form, that could have been interesting. Instead I was just frustrated and sad that the author wasn't using words to their fullest effect. (There's also an issue with historical accuracy, language, and the language used to describe colors. Like, if your book is about color and you have a character use the word "fuchsia" in a time period where that word was not used to describe color, then you're opening up some giant theoretical questions about language and meaning that need some addressing.)

I really wish I could have read a version of this that had gone through more rounds of editing. It's a quick and easy (almost juvenile) enough read that I wouldn't steer anyone away from it, necessarily. It's an okay book about an interesting and important topic. 3.5/5

[Ctgt · Rating 4 out of 5]

8/10

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shimmer, Maryland is a quiet town on the edges of a marsh that has been home to a number of artists whose work has captivated art criticism graduate student Xavier Wentworth. When he comes to visit Shimmer to work on his thesis, he finds a land haunted both by the horrors of slavery and a mysterious presence in the marsh that gives an odd and unsettling life to artistic work.

Gidney's novel is about a lot of things: the dualism of ancestral trauma and inherited cultural gifts, the modern identity of being black in America, the fascinated and somewhat niche secrets of forgotten and local arts movements. It all wraps up nicely together in a short tale of magical realism told through eyes of very different people all with one thing in common: they're black in America and find themselves in Shimmer.

In a lot of ways, Gidney's novel reminds me of the panel held at Yale between Roxane Gay, Saeed Jones, and others on the delicacy of writing trauma. Fuchsia, the ethereal presence who comes from the bog to touch the minds of future artists Hazel and Shadrach, respectively, feels like the unsettling rendering of a muse. This is a muse born out of cursed and defiled land where humans were held in bondage and the horrors of slavery stained the area. She attaches herself to a slave Hazel, offering artistic hauntings that result in a seemingly magical quilt that first catches Xavier's eye as a child. She offers creative imagination to Shadrach after he comes into town a poor black man part of a vaudeville troupe. In the mind of a slave owner, she's a horrific nightmare as, perhaps, slaveowners are forced to look into a mental mirror.

From a writing standpoint, Gidney tells several engaging stories of very different walks of life all coming together in Shimmer. He also, very seamlessly slips into near poetry by the end as Xavier's research and Lincoln's obsession with the artwork at the rumored haunted museum start to reach a climax. The story is a soft one, told in different timelines of different people in different worlds, all brought together by both the good and bad that they share and all affected by the same spectral hue.

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s an actual magic imbued in this book.

[Sarah Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book some time ago on the recommendation of someone whose reviews I trust (probably KJ Charles) - and then forgot all about it. Just found it again recently and -wow! What a delight of a book- full of delicious words and luscious imagery - beautifully woven together to display the gems of its characters- including the hungry child-spirit who provides the inspiration for the others. It's both terrifying and joyous- an excellent metaphor for the creative process itself. It reminds me of Tarkovsky's great film Andrei Rublev, which depicts so well both the life-renewal and devastation the making of great art leaves in its wake.

[Colleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an engaging read about a group of people in a particular town who are pulled into a hue of purple-pink, the color of the marsh flowers in the area. The book goes back and forth between a character who is originally unnamed (but becomes Fuchsia) from the past, an intermediate time, and the present day. A select group of Black people can see a special kind of magic in the art created by former residents of the town, especially a quilt made by a slave. The problem is that the artists can become obsessed with the hue and it can potentially ruin lives. Overall, this was a really interesting book with a unique storyline, it's easy to read, and fairly short. Recommended.

[Jimmy Bramlett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fuchsia Dreams

A magical journey through the centuries that is simultaneously reassuring and disturbing. I deliberately read this slowly so it wouldn't end. I'm upset that it did.

[Andrew Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stirring and vibrantly layered novel about art, oppression, and ghosts. Distinctive and fascinating characters guide you through secrets, horror, and jubilation.

[Kathy Fletcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a different and interesting read. I didn’t know where it was going - marsh ghost, muse, susceptible hosts channeling ancestral history, queer passion and color.

[olli v · Rating 4 out of 5]

"i glow pink in the night in my room", but sinister

[Robbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might sound a little odd, but it took me a moment to realize that Gidney was a really good writer. Something about the selection and positioning of the words is a little on the plain side but the imagery that they convey is amazing. This is such a rich and beautiful book. It has this haunting quality that fills the reader full of the place and characters that's somewhat reminiscent of the haint that fills the artists with their compulsions to express her vision. It's effective, which is such a strange thing to say of such a romantic ghost story, but it really is the best way that I can describe the way that the author pushes images into the reader's heads. I think it helps somewhat that the imagery of the eastern MD marshlands made me long to be back in the marshes of my hometown, but I think that I'd have loved it as much even without that personal anchor. There are moments that aren't perfect – sometimes the way that memories are told feels a little out of place and forced a little to fill in some gaps, and the movement of the final two chapters seemed a bit choppy – but there's nothing that managed to push me out of the story or made me less curious about the characters. Overall, it's wondrous and wonderful.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Today's episode of "what did I just read?" but in a good way.
Bold of Gidney to write a book about the imaginative use of color among a centuries-spanning collection of artists where all you're ever doing is trying to imagine what's going on. (Granted, that's also the point and the impossibility of the color is not just its place on the spectrum - in the sense that magenta doesn't exist and that's it's just your brain trying to cope with two wave-lengths that ought to add up to green but are definitely not green and I'm quite sure Gidney knows that - but that the whole speculative element of the story relies on what can and can't be seen. So of course it's a book.)
The whole thing is unnerving like that, although Gidney is extremely careful to keep the story within the realm of the narratively comfortable even as the premise and the scenery gets more uncomfortable. But art about art is just...like that and this is, for all its incisive observations about what constitutes art rather than craft and knowledge (and its production) and queerness as it intersects with race, is art about art. And it's just like that.

[Emmett · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Spectral Hue is a story with unique characters that immediately pulls you in. Every separate character perspective has something different to offer, with all of them being woven together slowly throughout. While I wouldn't classify it as horror, it still manages to strike an unsettling tone while being an enjoyable read. Gidney writes some beautiful prose.

I don't know that I will ever be able to look at a fuchsia-colored flower again without thinking of this book. And I am not gonna lie and say I didn't feel a little creeped out after my Kindle automatically turned to its nighttime reddish color right after I finished a chapter that ended with flashes of magenta. 😆

I also loved reading about this fictional setting in Maryland, as I grew up around Baltimore and had visited pretty much every real town/city the author mentioned. It was great to feel more connected to the story in that way. I will certainly be looking out for more by Gidney in the future.

[Bjorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book, but it's probably not a book everyone will love. For one, it's a *very* slow burn and not at all driven by a plot. Almost nothing "happens" in the book, but the story unfolds throughout the novel as though it were blossoming. It's a ghost story that is both like and very unlike every other ghost story I've ever read. In several ways it reminds me of both Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, both in its message and its craft. Many of the usual tropes and trappings of most ghost stories are present, but they're queered in strange and beautiful ways.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I first started reading this book, but I was not disappointed. If you enjoy dark, Weird fiction and if you like ghost stories, give this book a chance. I'm sure glad I did.

[Torie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think i'm settling at a 3.5? Rounding down bc while writing this review i was already forgetting major character names. I really liked the ideas in this, but the execution just didn't ever really grab me.

A Spectral Hue follows a large cast of Black characters throughout the history Shimmer, Maryland as they are connected by an otherworldly force compelling them to create artwork of the surrounding marshland. Xavier, one of the main characters, is an art studies student visiting Shimmer to write a thesis on some of the strange pinkish-purple artwork kept in the local museum.

I love a weird story, but the prose in this felt jarringly disparate from the dreamy, ethereal, artsy vibes it seems to want to create. There was nothing wrong with the writing, and i did enjoy it more as the book went on, but the first few chapters in particular felt very stilted. Sentence structure lacking in variation, descriptions lacking any descriptors other than the obvious and expected.

Into the spoilers-
i really wished this pushed more into the emotions and character interactions, slowed down a bit and gave some dreamy or lyrical sequences. The large cast of characters was interesting for telling Amarantha's history through each person's viewpoint, but it was a bit too large for anyone to really feel developed in such a short book and ended up feeling kinda rushed. The moments of artistic compulsion were the most interesting segments, but even they didn't feel weighty enough when a dozen of them happened within a hundred pages. I wanted cthulu-levels of madness and loss of self and that's just not the story the book is telling.

[Ann Schwader · Rating 4 out of 5]

What's it like to have a muse? What's it like to be one, & how does one wind up becoming one? Is muse-driven creativity a blessing, a curse, or both? These are a few of the many related questions that are worked out -- but never quite answered -- in Gidney's beautifully strange, dark novel of artistic obsession.

On the surface, the plot is simple enough: an African-American grad student becomes fascinated by the Shimmer Artists, a loosely-defined group of "Outsider Artists" working in varied media, all inspired by the Shimmer Marsh in Maryland & the nearly indescribable color of a flower that grows there. Said student goes to the town of Shimmer, investigates the mystery of these artists, & eventually discovers way more than he expected to. There are possibly ghosts involved. There is possibly possession, or something akin to it.

The plot, however, is only a small part of this novel. Although it's nearly impossible to describe without committing spoiler, A Spectral Hue is a poetic examination of intertwined lives & creative drives stronger even than slavery. It is character-focused, though deeply supernatural. it is one of the odder & lovelier things I've read this year, though I did dock one star for my sheer confusion. Readers more tolerant of ambiguity & loose ends will likely find this a five-star experience. Recommended for fans of dark poetic writing, cultural exploration, & subtle chills.