I have never felt such strong emotion in both of two opposite directions as I did while reading Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente. I am not alone in either hating or strongly admiring this book, and I even found another reader who felt exactly as I did: I hated the book for a good long while, then I got really angry because I found some bits to be brilliant (in the other reader’s words, “Wait? Do I like this book?”), I flip-flopped there for the third quarter of the book (a little longer than that) and then I went frantic at the end wanting Valente to stop talking before she ruined the book again. (Too late.) At book club there were some very strong opinions and was also so much to talk about. But maybe that’s because there was just too much crammed into the darned thing.

Severin Unck—darling of the nine planets’ silent picture screen since she was a baby—has disappeared. According to the one witness who was there, she was there one second and gone the next. Or was there only one witness? And was she there one second and gone the next? All we know is that she was on Venus shooting a documentary that meant a lot to her, with her true love and several other people who had been around for awhile in the glitzy, debauched world of Oxblood Pictures. But there were others at home too, on far-flung planets, who have a stake in her life and who want to know: where is she? And is she alive? And can they keep their secrets while still asking these two, crucial questions?

Well. This was just another book club read, for the speculative fiction book club I am in. It was time for a sci-fi read and the group leader held this one up. Didn’t really look like much till you looked closer: the telescope which the woman gazed at the stars through was an old-timey camera. Hmm. Then the cover copy says, “Radiance is a decopunk pulp SF alt-history space opera mystery set in a Hollywood-and solar system-very different from our own.” Hm, hm, hmm. Promising, right? But what I was not told in the packaging of this book could fill, well, a book. Important thing to know number one: Radiance is less a deco-punk alt-history (though it has a little alt history mostly overshadowed by the fantastical) and more of a trippy, sometimes phantasmagorical mash-up of space opera, sure, but then horror, gothic, noir, mystery, old Hollywood, art deco, Victorian, fairy tale, Who Framed Roger Rabbit with The Truman Show THING with endless references to Greek mythology (especially the Lotus Eaters and the Grey Sisters), The Wizard of Oz, Edgar Allan Poe, Dracula, and I think a bunch of early twentieth-century (Ray Bradbury-ish) sci fi that I didn’t catch, all written IN A LITERARY FICTION writing style. Important thing to know number two: it is nonlinear, non-reliable, non-obvious, pieced together and presented as letters, journal entries, movie scripts, interviews, PSAs, ship manifests, whatever. Which means it will take some serious time to figure out what you are even reading. Important thing to know number three: it is FLUID-FILLED, by which I mean milk and blood are flying everywhere, as well as some insinuated other bodily fluids because there is a whole lotta f*ing (which is the word that is used every single time). So that’s the real lead-in to this book. Do you want to read it, now? You may.

I began this book thinking it was going to be just another sci-fi book. I studied the chronology and the list of settings symbols (the planets and Earth’s moon) at the beginning, three quotes, then jumped right into a scene where a docent or some-such is ushering people into the “prologue,” which is also film projected on their naked bodies? Okay. We’re already so meta. A few pages later and I am in a completely different place, where one editor-in-chief and then another go back and forth between two movie premier red carpets’ gossip across almost thirty years, which you won’t understand unless you kinda study the short chapter first, looking at the end as well as the beginning. Okay. Then after two more quotes we enter Part One of the book. And a short scene of a movie that ends in damaged film. Then two pages of video footage from a personal reel. Then audio from a production meeting, and by the last one we’re in the future of the story? Turn the page and I am on p. 46.

I am a great reader. I am a terrible listener. (I have trained and learned, so I’m not as bad as I once was. However, I still have ADHD.) I don’t listen to audiobooks (while reading the first time) because I have a hard time paying attention that way and absorbing what’s going on. And I don’t enjoy it nearly as much as putting my eyes on a page. However, by the time I was a tenth of the way into this book I had set it down no fewer than ten times and had let several days pass while I read in tiny pieces. I had picked up other books randomly, starting first chapters of other books just to (subconsciously) avoid returning to Radiance. Where was I? What was going on? And more importantly, couldn’t we stay in one scene long enough to let me enjoy actually reading??? I decided I hated this book. I got very passionate, waving my arms about holding a chef’s knife and a stalk of celery telling my husband that no matter how literary and experimental you wanted to be, it was the job—THE JOB—of a writer to usher the reader into their book, to orient them, welcome them (no matter how hostile-y) and provide some sort of hook (and don’t you dare tell me that’s a dirty word because it is not! And it is also not slummy!) Valente had failed me. So I bought the book on audio. (Sigh.)

I had used this method one other time in my life, and that was last fall when I was bound and determined to read Dracula and was a quarter of the way in and basically bored out of my mind. The audio turned on every time I got in my car and eventually I had listened to the whole darn thing. It was not painless. I figured Radiance could turn on every time I got in the car and with carpool and whatnot I would be through with the book before book club. I finished the book an hour before club, laying in front of my dog’s kennel petting his soft little head with one hand, my other hand grasping my smartphone as poor Heath Miller did virtual, frenetic cartwheels with his voice, gasping to a grand finale full of goofy cartoon voices and multiple accents—including a character who suddenly speaks in a Cornish accent for half a page. (Note: I ended up reading a few more sections on the page over the course of the book.)

Which means I didn’t study this book the way it is really meant to be studied as it is read. But somehow Miller (the audiobook narrator) managed to keep me basically aware of when in time, where in the universe, and in what tone I was reading—along which storyline. (I can’t believe I am only at this point in my review. This is going to be stoopid long.) For a long time, as I listened to the book, I kept hating the book. Then there was this one day, this one hour, this one moment when Valente dropped something (she has so many mic drops and secret reveals and cool references and beautiful phrases!) and I was actually soaring with the moment, with the prose, and I resisted that sucker. No way was I going to start enjoying this book now. But then there were more moments. And more things. And then we went back to the stuff I had grown to hate (and I think rightly): Valente’s pretentious, confusing, and masturbatory writing style. (Sorry. There is no better word for it than that.)

I mean, I read a few of her quotes from her interviews, and it sounds to me like she was all “I want to write this and I want to write this and this and this and this,” and instead of writing a bunch of books she just slammed all those ideas into one blob and spent seven years shoe-horning every last moment and idea into 500 pages. While on one hand she clearly had a crazy-deep familiarity with her material (and the research that went into it)—so much so that she forgot to initiate us into plenty of it—on the other hand she didn’t cut nearly enough. Sure, she could have broken it down, got rid of some of the wacky ideas, but that’s not actually what I ended up wanting in the end. In the end, I just wished she had cut some stinking adjectives, some repetitive phrases, some words! This is not poetry. This is not us watching Valente play with words. Oh wait, it is. But it shouldn’t be. Pick an image, a phrase, a metaphor, and whip the unused one out the window. This book is a study in too much. Cut your frickin’ darlings, darlin’.

And somehow, with so many characters and settings and storylines, the words and the experimental structure prevents the characters from becoming real, prevents the settings from being fully drawn or seeable, prevents the reader from being invested in the story(s). This is a meta novel, I guess, that doesn’t quite work on the level of a normal novel. It’s an idea book. It’s an experiment in Valente’s interests.

I’m gonna list out the rest because I’m sure you’re losing steam for reading this.

The end is ambiguous. Kind of. Most people read it as ambiguous. Be fore-warned.More importantly, the ending goes on way too long. There was a point (and many of my co-readers in book club agree with me) where the book ends on a satisfyingly ambiguous note and you’re sitting there thinking and even feeling pleasant about the read. And then she keeps going. And going. If only I had been there to hit the pen out of her hand. The final ending that she produces is cheesy and wrong (in relation to the rest of the book).It’s pretentious. That bears repeating. Yeah-yeah. We get it. You can write words.It’s humorous, but also very dark and gritty (though some sections have much more of one or the other of these things).Be warned: the multiverse shows up at the end. Some readers (like me) are going to try to pretend like that didn’t just happen and the multiverse is just another possibility and not a reality to the story. I know the multiverse has been so overused that modern readers sometimes see it as similar to saying, “And he woke up. It was all just a dream!” If you feel that way, then yeah, I’m warning you.Another reader said my words right out of her mouth: “I didn’t do so well with all the distractions. The format was difficult for me.” Most of us couldn’t figure out why it was not chronological. What was the justification? At least to this extent.Okay, this is a biggie. Probably it should have its own paragraph, but… Valente wrote a composite book of many formats and voices, but she wrote it in one voice. Hers. The one she had mastered after seven years in this strange, unique world and surrounded by her literary tomes and MFA degrees (so I assume). What the heck? Did no one else find that weird and distracting and wrong? (I forgot to bring it up at group.) On top of that, all the dialogue is in the same voice. Hers. And it’s such a florid voice. People don’t talk like that. I kinda think she was going for this culture’s voice, like silent film Hollywood mixed with space travel or whatever, but there is no variation in the vocabulary. This made me hopping mad, now and again. She stuck with style? Over sense?Similarly, the personalities of the characters were all similar. They’re all from the same group of people, yes, but they were basically all the same person with the same beliefs and life. This might just feel that way because the characters were fairly flat, subsumed under the structure and prose (which we already talked about), but in the end almost every character felt like the same person, to me.One reader—a reader who self-professed that she did not do well with experimental formats—actually made a list putting all the chapters in chronological order and read it that way. (!) There is definitely something that will be lost from the experience of this book if you read it that way, but heck, so will a lot of frustration. More power to her. Wish I had thought of it.It came across as a movie or a TV series. (A series because it would be way too long for a movie.) Not surprising, since this is about film and extremely visual.I understand some of her aims, get some of what she is trying to do. She hit some of it, like in the tone(s) and some of the language and some of the twists and the aha! moments. But I honestly think she failed at more of them.It’s purposely wild and weird. That was fun.It is a different and fascinating world.Pay attention to the titles of the “movies” and “documentaries” in the book. The title of the book is one of the surprises at the end, but it won’t land if you haven’t been catching on to the titles and how they might, ahem, change over time.Pluto was my personal highlight of the book. It’s a play within a play, highly referential, everyone is trippin’ (and therefore the unreliability has an explanation). I am tired of trippin’-scenes in movies and books lately, and this section was horrifying and violent, but I thought Valente’s writing really shined here. It was so Masque of the Red Death.The magic world is consistent within itself. That is definitely something.Another warning: some slasher-film-type stuff as well as body horror. This is a true genre-hopper.It was suggested that this weird and wild mash-up was executed better in In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. It actually looks amazing.

As one person in book club put it, “It’s interesting craft-wise. But get to the point!” We might be dazzled, but we don’t care.

This is gonna’ sound straight-up crazy, but I almost want to go back and read the book over again. There is just so much there and so many amazing moments. But they are just moments, adrift in a sea of confusion and words-for-words’-sake. If only I could go back and relive the high moments without having to touch the low points with a ten-foot pole. Perhaps it would be better just to move on to the next book. Yeah, I think that’s the ending that’s needed—inevitable—here. But is it?

“And of course in stories there is always fate. It goes by the name of foreshadowing and it is the emperor of everybody” (p40).

“You circle it. You stalk it. But you don’t call it out …. Coyness is what makes it art, darling” (p42).

“If you don’t put someone on-screen who loves him, the audience won’t know they’re supposed to” (p45).

“Death holds the rest together. You’ll believe everything else if you believe in the death. Once someone exsanguinates in front of you, well, anything can happen. You’re on the edge of your seat” (p280).

“I’m an extra in your story. Well, you’re an extra in mine, boy” (p282).

“Yet you believe her. Her! You look at her pretty little face on the screen emoting and stuttering and blushing and contemplating her rich girl’s life, and you think there wasn’t a script out of frame at her feet, rewritten to an inch of its life…” (p282))

“That’s how it goes—as soon as there’s anything interesting in Ancient Greece, some arsehole with a magic hat comes along to murder it” (p391).

“It’s only that a real live person can never shine like a movie you haven’t made yet” (p401).

“Maybe we all just should have used our grown-up voices a little more” (p401).

Radiance would make a great streaming series, but the CG budget would be through the roof. And of course the language itself would be lost, which is definitely one of the finer points of the book.