A review by undertheteacup
A Spectral Hue by Craig Laurance Gidney

5.0

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.