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Bleeding Light
A howl into the void, a ghost story, and a bit of a metaphysical hellride.
A misanthropic ghostwriter roams an island off the Kenyan coast. An Arizona teenager awaits the next stage in a secretive covenant. A renowned poet retraces her past amid a baffling netherworld. An international arms dealer’s son drifts through time, atoning for the death of the man he loved.
For readers who take their contemporary fiction with a tinge of the otherworldly, Bleeding Light is about mystical experiences, the symbolic fabric connecting us all, and desperate people seeking affirmation—through religious, cosmic, chemical and other means—of a world beyond their own. It’s a grimly funny and often trippy take on transcendence in a hypercommodified age.
"A darkly gleaming marvel. Searing, creepy and mystical—as if Don DeLillo had set out to steal Paulo Coelho's flock."—Sean Michaels, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and author of The Wagers
A misanthropic ghostwriter roams an island off the Kenyan coast. An Arizona teenager awaits the next stage in a secretive covenant. A renowned poet retraces her past amid a baffling netherworld. An international arms dealer’s son drifts through time, atoning for the death of the man he loved.
For readers who take their contemporary fiction with a tinge of the otherworldly, Bleeding Light is about mystical experiences, the symbolic fabric connecting us all, and desperate people seeking affirmation—through religious, cosmic, chemical and other means—of a world beyond their own. It’s a grimly funny and often trippy take on transcendence in a hypercommodified age.
"A darkly gleaming marvel. Searing, creepy and mystical—as if Don DeLillo had set out to steal Paulo Coelho's flock."—Sean Michaels, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and author of The Wagers
354 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 3, 2021
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January 18, 2021*Spoilers ahead*
Rob Benvie’s 2021 novel "Bleeding Light" brings us to the edge of where experience mingles with the transcendent, divine intonations take mysterious forms, vapors condense into light.
The novel begins with an LA ghostwriter travelling to the island of Lamu in Kenya to work on the memoirs of a powerful yet mysterious international arms trafficker. Drifting into intrigue, our man—aptly named Webb—arrives at his suitably gothic destination: “no sign of lights in the windows of the vast stone face.” Just to ensure the point isn’t missed, his employer is Dred Hausen.
There is a kind of brusque stiffness to Webb. He describes Lamu’s “angular topography disallowing reliable ascertainment of its dimensions.” Sounds like a line lifted from a Victorian journal. In the early pages, the reader could be forgiven for thinking we’re in a modern retelling of Dracula, but Webb we soon learn is no Johnathan Harker.
He spends the trip listening to recordings of Dred prepared in advance and reminiscing about his friendly relationship with a previous book project’s subject, an ex-porn star names Natalie. Dred’s voice recordings drift between childhood memories and frank depictions of the carnage accompanying the early days building commercial empire. Webb finds himself increasingly drawn into them. He is repelled, but fascinated like Martin Sheen listening to Kurtz’ increasingly disconnected voice in Apocalypse Now!
Dred recounts how one night he encountered a “wall of vapour” that opened into a “formation of intemerate white light.” He claims that the light constituted an “invitation to another world”—“direct and exclusive transmission of information. Meant for me alone.” This, Dred insists, has been the reason for his drive to achieve financial success in life.
Webb is tainted by the suggestion of transcendence and the implication that its cost is payable in blood. However, just as the reader feels they have a grip on the narrative, it pulls away. Webb is summarily dismissed from the project and sent packing.
The narrative quickly switches focus to Jovena Hoedemaeker, a low-tier school administrator in Arizona. Jovena—literally, young woman—is deeply troubled. She spent her childhood with her mother, running from creditors and landlords. Her imagination is peopled with the darker figures of her mother’s inherited mythologies—“Demons are everywhere, her mother said. Traucos and wekufes and cucuys and all those creeps.”
Dark mythologies bleed into reality. These tales manifest through Jovena’s multitude of unresolved issues. Her financial instability, the constant moving, the fact that her brother has gone missing on a soul-searching quest in Africa: these things become her monsters. She receives haranguing phone calls from an unknown sender. Her kitchen is trashed by a demon—“Even though this was not something to be believed, she knew it to be true.” Jovena, who is covertly living in the school’s drama classroom, is always just at the very edge of keeping it together.
She befriends Alejandra, the daughter of the principal (Jovena’s boss) and, as it happens, the granddaughter of a famous Mexican poet. However, she too is deeply troubled. Her relationship with her father is distant as she floats through the sea of ennui that is her life. She maintains a coterie of friends, “the coven”—a semi-nihilistic gang who have all been receiving mysterious phone calls promising “gateways to realms unfathomable” in exchange for blood sacrifice.
The teens gather in an abandoned stretch of drainage passageways to ponder this, drink beer and mostly shoot the shit. But push soon comes to shove: something has to be done. Steps have to be taken. Bartek, one of the crew, decides to bring assault rifles to a school function and so with spilled blood open these gates of unseen perception.
The novel shifts its perspective again, this time to Ximena, famed Mexican poet and Alejandra’s grandmother. This section is the only one dislodged from the narrative’s timeline. It traces her early days: her failed marriage, her poetry, her familial ties cast against the backdrop of Mexico’s political turmoil of 60s and 70s.
However, the highlight of Ximena’s narrative—indeed one of the highlights of Bleeding Light—is her surreal foray into an American town. Both welcomed and repelled, both respected and reviled: she finds herself ultimately running for (and perhaps from) her life. Perceived as a stain, a revilement, an element of corruption—she is hunted. Easily the most eerie and disturbing section of the book, it is perhaps also the most introspective and poetic. I need hardly comment on the contemporary political resonance.
The final act, as it were, brings us into the orbit of Peter, Dred’s son. Peter, like all of the characters, is physically and spiritually lost. His father’s men have come to collect him for a meeting and he recounts his adult life. His volatile relationship with Alain, the brilliant journalist whose bright career was cut short by heroin addiction, is beautifully touching. It’s also the main event of his life.
The devastation he feels in the wake of losing Alain is moving precisely because Peter is so tight lipped. Benvie is careful to reign in Peter’s emoting. Instead, the reader is privy to a selection of his memories. The most important is their trip to India. Alain is working to break the story of a woman named Aradhya, a rape victim whose story is suppressed by the provincial authorities. Alain was working with this woman to bring her story to light and reveal a system at work that has allowed this abuse.
Peter refuses his father’s invitation to come into the fold and sets off on his new life. He’s comforted with a final letter from Aradhya to Alain expressing her comfort with what is to come.
So, the chain can be broken. Where Webb transmutes the failures of his father into violence and ambition, where Jovena grows her mother’s fears into her own demons, where Alejandra relives her grandmother’s alienation and her destiny as witness to violence, Peter breaks free.
Perhaps this is the logic of the narrative. Stylistically, "Bleeding Light" is not a conventional novel. It dispenses with quotation marks, blurring the lines between voice, thought and narrative discourse. More Modernist than anything else, "Bleeding Light" doesn’t follow the course of a single narrative, but twists together the lives of a handful of different characters into a unified thematic experience. It reads like a set of affiliated short stories more than it does a novel. What unifies the book is these characters’ encounters with the transcendent.
However, these characters do not operate in a vacuum. Each one’s search ripples through the others’ lives. Benvie leaves a trail of breadcrumbs, but home and the witch’s cabin are one and the same.
For instance, Webb in a fit of insensibility, murders a wandering free soul—an American who turns out to be Miguel, Jovena’s missing brother. Late in the novel, we learn Peter had witnessed the event and carried Miguel, barely clinging to life, to safety. Each retelling of the event bestows a different kind of meaning. For Webb, this is a blood sacrifice: a necessary act to receive transcendent awareness. However, like with Alejandra intervening to stop a mass shooting, the bloodletting is curtailed.
There is no main character, or even lasting character in Bleeding Light. The whole narrative dances around Dred Hausen’s presence—he’s like the black hole at the center of a galaxy, the absence around which everything seems to revolve. When he finally appears near the end of the novel, it’s for a brief and anticlimactic conversation. Dred Hausen the man hardly lives up to "Dred Hausen" the ethereal voice. When Peter walks off the boat intent on starting his life anew, it’s hard to say which one he is trying to escape.
"Bleeding Light" traces an idea through the experience of characters, who function more as settings than narrative actors: these characters and their worlds are surfaces. The ambivalence of transcendence, both its possibilities and its costs—this is the real main character of "Bleeding Light." An encounter with the ineffable is the source of life’s true value, and yet as we’re told blood sacrifice is a prerequisite for these “gateways to realms unfathomable.” The weight of such a transaction presses upon these surfaces. The choices these characters make in response provide a chorus to the unfolding tragedy.
There is a chasm here that Benvie is exploring—“How to reconcile substance with the insurmountable,” as the novel puts it. Or, as Dred tells Peter near the end, “Juju and business go hand in hand.” This question is at the crux of this novel—the common ground all of the narrative sequences share. How do we reconcile the transcendent with the mundane? The answer to that lofty question appears to be what some of these characters are willing to kill for.
Jovena, after all, is destabilized by this mythical intrusion into ordinary life. Ximena to an extent is as well, though she makes her rugged peace. Alejandra is haunted by mysterious phone calls and one mysterious run-in after another. There always seems to be some junkie around the corner, ready to bump into her and plant some disturbing seed in her aloof yet fertile mind.
Where do we draw the line between mysticism and insanity? Benvie may not be able to answer that, but he does appear to be dramatizing a set of points of view and daring us to guess where they sit in proximity to it.
Through it all we have the phenomenon of the phantom voice: Dred’s recordings, demonic whisperings, mysterious callers. However, the weight of this voice is too much and it presses Benvie’s characters into flight. These characters are all running from something, themselves in part, but that’s too easy. Psychological reductionism is too conventional a distillation for Benvie.
In her letter, Aradhya suggests that it would have been better for her child to have never existed, not just because of the suffering life entails, but because of the suffering her child may inflict on others. There is a strange moral weight to this antinatalism, given her circumstances, but she makes peace with her reality nonetheless. She too has seen another side of things, but ultimately hope is our only weapon against the world. To lose hope is to concede to one’s enemies. “I hope you find success in subduing the forces that haunt you,” she writes to Alain. Once again, we have a character we suspect knows a bit more than she’s saying.
Suffering in "Bleeding Light" comes not from the world, but from our inability to separate ourselves from it. It’s stubborn grasp holds us in the world and bestows meaning without our consent. These characters are entranced by a voice from the other side promising mastery over this life. But we should be wary lest in search of gods we should become monsters.
Rob Benvie’s 2021 novel "Bleeding Light" brings us to the edge of where experience mingles with the transcendent, divine intonations take mysterious forms, vapors condense into light.
The novel begins with an LA ghostwriter travelling to the island of Lamu in Kenya to work on the memoirs of a powerful yet mysterious international arms trafficker. Drifting into intrigue, our man—aptly named Webb—arrives at his suitably gothic destination: “no sign of lights in the windows of the vast stone face.” Just to ensure the point isn’t missed, his employer is Dred Hausen.
There is a kind of brusque stiffness to Webb. He describes Lamu’s “angular topography disallowing reliable ascertainment of its dimensions.” Sounds like a line lifted from a Victorian journal. In the early pages, the reader could be forgiven for thinking we’re in a modern retelling of Dracula, but Webb we soon learn is no Johnathan Harker.
He spends the trip listening to recordings of Dred prepared in advance and reminiscing about his friendly relationship with a previous book project’s subject, an ex-porn star names Natalie. Dred’s voice recordings drift between childhood memories and frank depictions of the carnage accompanying the early days building commercial empire. Webb finds himself increasingly drawn into them. He is repelled, but fascinated like Martin Sheen listening to Kurtz’ increasingly disconnected voice in Apocalypse Now!
Dred recounts how one night he encountered a “wall of vapour” that opened into a “formation of intemerate white light.” He claims that the light constituted an “invitation to another world”—“direct and exclusive transmission of information. Meant for me alone.” This, Dred insists, has been the reason for his drive to achieve financial success in life.
Webb is tainted by the suggestion of transcendence and the implication that its cost is payable in blood. However, just as the reader feels they have a grip on the narrative, it pulls away. Webb is summarily dismissed from the project and sent packing.
The narrative quickly switches focus to Jovena Hoedemaeker, a low-tier school administrator in Arizona. Jovena—literally, young woman—is deeply troubled. She spent her childhood with her mother, running from creditors and landlords. Her imagination is peopled with the darker figures of her mother’s inherited mythologies—“Demons are everywhere, her mother said. Traucos and wekufes and cucuys and all those creeps.”
Dark mythologies bleed into reality. These tales manifest through Jovena’s multitude of unresolved issues. Her financial instability, the constant moving, the fact that her brother has gone missing on a soul-searching quest in Africa: these things become her monsters. She receives haranguing phone calls from an unknown sender. Her kitchen is trashed by a demon—“Even though this was not something to be believed, she knew it to be true.” Jovena, who is covertly living in the school’s drama classroom, is always just at the very edge of keeping it together.
She befriends Alejandra, the daughter of the principal (Jovena’s boss) and, as it happens, the granddaughter of a famous Mexican poet. However, she too is deeply troubled. Her relationship with her father is distant as she floats through the sea of ennui that is her life. She maintains a coterie of friends, “the coven”—a semi-nihilistic gang who have all been receiving mysterious phone calls promising “gateways to realms unfathomable” in exchange for blood sacrifice.
The teens gather in an abandoned stretch of drainage passageways to ponder this, drink beer and mostly shoot the shit. But push soon comes to shove: something has to be done. Steps have to be taken. Bartek, one of the crew, decides to bring assault rifles to a school function and so with spilled blood open these gates of unseen perception.
The novel shifts its perspective again, this time to Ximena, famed Mexican poet and Alejandra’s grandmother. This section is the only one dislodged from the narrative’s timeline. It traces her early days: her failed marriage, her poetry, her familial ties cast against the backdrop of Mexico’s political turmoil of 60s and 70s.
However, the highlight of Ximena’s narrative—indeed one of the highlights of Bleeding Light—is her surreal foray into an American town. Both welcomed and repelled, both respected and reviled: she finds herself ultimately running for (and perhaps from) her life. Perceived as a stain, a revilement, an element of corruption—she is hunted. Easily the most eerie and disturbing section of the book, it is perhaps also the most introspective and poetic. I need hardly comment on the contemporary political resonance.
The final act, as it were, brings us into the orbit of Peter, Dred’s son. Peter, like all of the characters, is physically and spiritually lost. His father’s men have come to collect him for a meeting and he recounts his adult life. His volatile relationship with Alain, the brilliant journalist whose bright career was cut short by heroin addiction, is beautifully touching. It’s also the main event of his life.
The devastation he feels in the wake of losing Alain is moving precisely because Peter is so tight lipped. Benvie is careful to reign in Peter’s emoting. Instead, the reader is privy to a selection of his memories. The most important is their trip to India. Alain is working to break the story of a woman named Aradhya, a rape victim whose story is suppressed by the provincial authorities. Alain was working with this woman to bring her story to light and reveal a system at work that has allowed this abuse.
Peter refuses his father’s invitation to come into the fold and sets off on his new life. He’s comforted with a final letter from Aradhya to Alain expressing her comfort with what is to come.
So, the chain can be broken. Where Webb transmutes the failures of his father into violence and ambition, where Jovena grows her mother’s fears into her own demons, where Alejandra relives her grandmother’s alienation and her destiny as witness to violence, Peter breaks free.
Perhaps this is the logic of the narrative. Stylistically, "Bleeding Light" is not a conventional novel. It dispenses with quotation marks, blurring the lines between voice, thought and narrative discourse. More Modernist than anything else, "Bleeding Light" doesn’t follow the course of a single narrative, but twists together the lives of a handful of different characters into a unified thematic experience. It reads like a set of affiliated short stories more than it does a novel. What unifies the book is these characters’ encounters with the transcendent.
However, these characters do not operate in a vacuum. Each one’s search ripples through the others’ lives. Benvie leaves a trail of breadcrumbs, but home and the witch’s cabin are one and the same.
For instance, Webb in a fit of insensibility, murders a wandering free soul—an American who turns out to be Miguel, Jovena’s missing brother. Late in the novel, we learn Peter had witnessed the event and carried Miguel, barely clinging to life, to safety. Each retelling of the event bestows a different kind of meaning. For Webb, this is a blood sacrifice: a necessary act to receive transcendent awareness. However, like with Alejandra intervening to stop a mass shooting, the bloodletting is curtailed.
There is no main character, or even lasting character in Bleeding Light. The whole narrative dances around Dred Hausen’s presence—he’s like the black hole at the center of a galaxy, the absence around which everything seems to revolve. When he finally appears near the end of the novel, it’s for a brief and anticlimactic conversation. Dred Hausen the man hardly lives up to "Dred Hausen" the ethereal voice. When Peter walks off the boat intent on starting his life anew, it’s hard to say which one he is trying to escape.
"Bleeding Light" traces an idea through the experience of characters, who function more as settings than narrative actors: these characters and their worlds are surfaces. The ambivalence of transcendence, both its possibilities and its costs—this is the real main character of "Bleeding Light." An encounter with the ineffable is the source of life’s true value, and yet as we’re told blood sacrifice is a prerequisite for these “gateways to realms unfathomable.” The weight of such a transaction presses upon these surfaces. The choices these characters make in response provide a chorus to the unfolding tragedy.
There is a chasm here that Benvie is exploring—“How to reconcile substance with the insurmountable,” as the novel puts it. Or, as Dred tells Peter near the end, “Juju and business go hand in hand.” This question is at the crux of this novel—the common ground all of the narrative sequences share. How do we reconcile the transcendent with the mundane? The answer to that lofty question appears to be what some of these characters are willing to kill for.
Jovena, after all, is destabilized by this mythical intrusion into ordinary life. Ximena to an extent is as well, though she makes her rugged peace. Alejandra is haunted by mysterious phone calls and one mysterious run-in after another. There always seems to be some junkie around the corner, ready to bump into her and plant some disturbing seed in her aloof yet fertile mind.
Where do we draw the line between mysticism and insanity? Benvie may not be able to answer that, but he does appear to be dramatizing a set of points of view and daring us to guess where they sit in proximity to it.
Through it all we have the phenomenon of the phantom voice: Dred’s recordings, demonic whisperings, mysterious callers. However, the weight of this voice is too much and it presses Benvie’s characters into flight. These characters are all running from something, themselves in part, but that’s too easy. Psychological reductionism is too conventional a distillation for Benvie.
In her letter, Aradhya suggests that it would have been better for her child to have never existed, not just because of the suffering life entails, but because of the suffering her child may inflict on others. There is a strange moral weight to this antinatalism, given her circumstances, but she makes peace with her reality nonetheless. She too has seen another side of things, but ultimately hope is our only weapon against the world. To lose hope is to concede to one’s enemies. “I hope you find success in subduing the forces that haunt you,” she writes to Alain. Once again, we have a character we suspect knows a bit more than she’s saying.
Suffering in "Bleeding Light" comes not from the world, but from our inability to separate ourselves from it. It’s stubborn grasp holds us in the world and bestows meaning without our consent. These characters are entranced by a voice from the other side promising mastery over this life. But we should be wary lest in search of gods we should become monsters.
April 13, 2023
I can’t say much more about the plot that would make any more sense than what’s in the description. It follows 4+ characters through their lives as they deal with real and surreal experiences that span the globe. The best way I can think of to describe this book is like a darker and more complex version of Sea of Tranquility that gives the story and themes room to breathe and be fully explored. It can sometimes feel confusing and complicated, but I found the way the various perspectives and stories overlapped in the surreal experiences to be an intriguing and rewarding experience. Reading the book itself feels like a portal to a higher realm has been opened to you, inviting you to see the world behind the world. Sea of Tranquility meets Rabbits.
February 2, 2024
4.5 – I enjoyed this immensely, but it lost something with the supernatural elements.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews