“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
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.
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.
‘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
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
When human blood reacts with luminol, it lights up a ghostly blue. This reaction, most commonly used to detect whether violence has taken place at suspected crime scenes, combines the human and the chemical, it invokes violence but also transformation.
