continued from the last book., continued into the next book. Cass Neary is on the run. arriving in London via somebody else's passport, and on the way to destination unknown, she's just trying to stay alive long enough to connect, moving through the underground, in squats, raves, old hippy culture and criminal aquaintances old and new. murders appear before her that must be solved to move forward. and then, in an excursion to Cornwall, she finds the neolithic, as she goes down into a passage grave. it's a symbolic descent: Cass the once-photographer is a mystery, a camera obscura, she detects a mystery (casually, hands-on, in passing), the aperture is opening, the film stock decaying, death all around her. but Cass is Cass, still punk and dangerous, coming apart but at the same time stapling herself together, unsentimental. dyeing, near-dying. finding a path, perhaps, to retrieve her own soul along the way by looking into the hard light. ( )

I didn't finish the book because the main character was a drug addict and that is disturbing for me.

Something weird happened with this book. Some of it might have just been the narrator mispronouncing things, but some of it was the writing. I have listened to the first two Cass Neary books more than once and didn’t notice these issues at all so I’m baffled as to what fell apart with this one. Plot-wise it’s good though. I liked how Cass went from the frying pan to the fire. She’s a complete fuck up and won’t ever change. Half the shit she gets into is her own fault and you can’t help but wonder how she stays alive. Also, the end sets up the next book quite well and I will read it and hope the problems I had with this one don’t follow to that one.

Here we go -
Cass is a washed-up photographer who clings to Tri-X and her ancient Konika which at one point is described as a 13mm and a DSLR. What? The first could have been the narrator’s fault (the first of many dingers that should have been caught by the director or producer or someone!), but the DSLR part is on Hand. Later Cass gets it right by telling someone it is an SLR - single lens reflex. Weird. But it gets weirder, Cass then goes on to explain how you have to load a 35mm SLR in total darkness or the film is ruined. In what universe? I shot 35mm film cameras for 20 years and never had a problem loading my camera on the beach at noon. Well, not exactly but come on, you don’t have to load a 35mm camera in the dark. Neither do you have to unload it there. The only time total darkness comes into play is when there’s a problem rewinding - either because the camera is jammed or the film tore. Then you need a black bag/box to salvage the film. Ugh.

Usually Hand is adept with language and imagery, but I caught one related to photography that was pretty dumb - Cass spent more time staring into a shot glass than into a camera lens. Um, yeah. A photographer spends time staring into viewfinders, not lenses. Models stare into lenses. Then at the end of the book everyone kept grimacing every five minutes. It was crazy. Someone should have caught that.

Now onto Carol Monda’s mispronunciations -

Photographing - she meant the verb and the way that gets pronounced, but instead she said it like Photography. Huh? That’s is so not easy to do. Try it.

Tapas - I can’t remember how she killed it, but it wasn’t right.
Bespectacled became bespeckled
Sisal became seesal
Banal rhymed with anal
Billiards became billards
Clerestory was cleer story once and cler-ra-story another
Desultorily got mangled somehow, I forget way
Mollusks became molluks
And then a tire swung hung from a tree ( )