279 pages
Published 2023
Read from October 20 to October 25
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
My first exposure to Hailey Piper was her indie horror novel, The Worm and His Kings. That book showed considerable promise underneath the usual foibles of small press publication. This book comes to us from a more mainstream press, and it’s clear that more polish went into it. I still found Piper’s prose flat, but there are glimmers of something luminous scattered here and there. As a story, however, Light seems to me like a downgrade.
Where Worm gave us a dreadful sense of place and a thematically consistent threat, Light gives us a generic small town and preternatural evil that ranges from a jock-eating snake-woman to zombie-making rain to glass that spreads and immobilizes its victims (and that’s just in the first sixty pages). Eventually the pieces do come together and make more sense; even the generic nature of the town has an explanation. Unfortunately, the story feels padded with a lot of running back and forth. I didn’t think it made the best use of its central motif.
Maybe that last paragraph overstates the case a bit. The book is fine, really. I think I’m disgruntled because I had genuinely high expectations for Light. The cover blurbs, in particular, made it sound next level: “A fully-formed goddess of a novel,” and so forth. That’ll teach me to believe in blurbs at my old age.
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