“A frightening fairytale, surreal, not the story you think you know. A book that reads like a spell, meant to be read slowly. It unfolds like a strange dream, and a nightmare. A book I still think about years after reading it.” Kirin Khan
On Christmas night, a small girl is crowned at a pageant, before stumbling into the snowy darkness, alone, to meet her greatest fan. Set in Rosewood’s forest, the “creeping liquefaction” of the dead produces a fungal harvest that casts a spell on the town. In the endless dark of winter, feral creatures thrive, and psychedelic spores infect the air. The Museum of Atheism, deep below ground, is full of hallucinatory terrors.
“A fierce and deadly little fantasia that bites its way deep into your brain.” Brian Evenson
“We were plump and pretty, our skin glowed like Chinese lanterns and he wanted our laughter for himself’: In THE LUMINOL REELS, Laura Ellen Joyce finds the blue-glowing, b-movie heart of Plath’s and Ballard’s atrocity exhibitions and the parapornography of reliquaries. Joyce may write: ‘This one is for the sickos,’ but this is a book for readers who are into David Lynch, Aase Berg, Bluebeard (any version), hagiography; ‘splatter gurlesque’ and media theory. In other words: people who want their reading to feel like drinking ‘luminol margaritas.’” —Johannes Göransson
THE LUMINOL REELS takes its imagery from pornography, Catholicism, and crime scene investigation to interrogate the violence done to women. It considers the ongoing brutality of the femicides in Ciudad Juarez and the institutional misogyny of the Catholic Church. Violence is intrinsically linked to location, and the shrines, quinceañera parties, holy communions, and seances of this book are all stained luminescent blue.
Excerpts from The Luminol Reels
‘Gynoshow’, ‘Black Mass’. ‘Twins’, ‘Bearbaiting’, ‘Mass Burial’, ‘Stillbirth’, and ‘Desert Run’ at The Rupture
‘Porno’ at Sleepingfish
‘Saints’ at Black Sun Lit
Reviews of The Luminol Reels
Gabino Iglesias at LARB’s Marginalia Review of Books
Elizabeth Mikesch in Tarpaulin Sky
Blake Butler in VICE
Diarmuid Hester at 3AM
Ronnie Peltier in New Delta Review
Ian Baran at New York Public Library
Luke Taylor in Full Stop
James R. Gapinski at Heavy Feather Review
“This book will forever change how you read about violence.” Nicola Maye Goldberg
Representations of forensic procedures saturate popular culture in both fiction and true crime. One of the most striking forensic tools used in these narratives is the chemical luminol, so named because it glows an eerie greenish-blue when it comes into contact with the tiniest drops of human blood.
Luminol is a deeply ambivalent object: it is both a tool of the police, historically abused and misappropriated, and yet it offers hope to families of victims by allowing hidden crimes to surface. Forensic enquiry can exonerate those falsely accused of crimes, and yet the rise of forensic science is synonymous with the development of the deeply racist ‘science’ of eugenics.
Luminol Theory investigates the possibility of using a tool of the state in subversive, or radical, ways. By introducing luminol as an agent of forensic inquiry, Luminol Theory approaches the exploratory stages that a crime scene investigation might take, exploring experimental literature as though these texts were ‘crime scenes’ in order to discover what this deeply strange object can tell us about crime, death, and history, to make visible violent crimes, and to offer a tangible encounter with death and finitude.
At the luminol-drenched crime scene, flashes of illumination throw up words, sentences, and fragments that offer luminous, strange glimpses, bobbing up from below their polished surfaces. When luminol shines its light, it reveals, it is magical, it is prescient, and it has a nasty allure
