Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2302559 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 413 pages

From Amazon.com
In 1999 the world has gone to hell: global warming, AIDS, urban decay, environmental disasters, and, above it all, the Glimmering. The Glimmering is an accident of modern society, a phenomenon that is destroying the ozone layer and killing the earth. In these last days, Jack Finnegan, suffering from AIDS, has come home to his family's decaying Manhattan mansion to die. He will meet Trip Marlowe, a rock star hooked on the hallucinogenic IZE, and unknowingly play out a bizarre drama scripted by his former lover, the "sociocultural pathologist" Leonard Thrope. You won't be able to put down this engrossing tale.

From Library Journal
After a March 1997 Antarctic ocean avalanche released methane to mix with bromotetrachloride in the atmosphere during a solar storm, strange charged particles began the glimmering in the ozone layer. HIV-positive magazine publisher Jack Finnegan awaits the millennium in his crumbling New York mansion. Hand's (Waking the Moon, HarperPrism: HarperCollins, 1995) bleak ecological disaster novel, which straddles sf and fantasy, belongs in most collections.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Fin-de-siŠcle/apocalyptic yarn from the author of Waking the Moon (1995), etc. Earth's atmosphere, destroyed by pollution and ozone depletion, coruscates with bizarrely colorful discharges, banishing night and hiding the stars. In 1999, everyone's seemingly crazy, drugged, fanatical, or dying of AIDS. Photographer and ``sociocultural pathologist'' Leonard Thrope gives AIDS patient and former lover Jack Finnegan a new drug whipped up by a former Japanese WW II medical experimenter; Jack soon feels better but starts to see. . . ghosts? visions? Then Leonard jabs fundamentalist rock singer Trip Marlowe with a new synthetic drug, IZE, that's addictive, psychotropic, and confers the ability to see. . . what Jack sees? Trip spends a blissful afternoon in the arms of attractive waif Marz Candry, who then disappears. In despair, Trip tries to kill himself, but instead he's rescued from a Maine beach by AIDS victim Martin Dionysos, another of Leonard's exes. Later, Marz will turn up at Jack's, only to die in childbirth before a recovered Trip arrives. The Golden Family corporation, inventor and distributor of IZE, claims to be able to restore the atmosphere, but its fix-it airships are destroyed by ecoterrorist bombs. Leonard, meanwhile, revels in all the millennial weirdness he's helped create. Flashy and downbeat, a sort of pre-post-cyberpunk as depressing as it is pointless. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.