the Book oF luce

David Bowie looms large in LR Fredericks’s third novel. It’s impossible to read about the book’s gender and identity-fluid rockstar hero Luce and not be reminded of the original Starman. But where Bowie wrote songs imagining otherworldly messiahs, Luce might actually be one...

The book’s narrator, Chimera Obscura, met the singer once and was dazzled by his/her life-altering presence. Now she’s determined to find out just who Luce really is, but the quest leads to her being hounded by sinister, possibly even demonic, forces.

Fredericks’s hallucinatory novel is equal parts hippy travelogue and pulp existential thriller. Clearly fuelled by a love of the mythology that surrounded the ’60s and ’70s music scene, especially its ties to the occult, it’s a witty and weird tale with shades of both Philip K Dick, and Kieron Gillen/Jamie McKelvie’s comic The Wicked + The Divine.

Chimera, however, grates as a central character. She’s as pretentious as you’d expect with a name like that and, like that guy you met who’d done peyote while backpacking during his gap year, she just won’t shut up about drugs. With a story that spans more than 500 pages the book feels padded in places too; a stoned shaggy dog story.

It’s an interesting and strange book – just more of a “Pin Ups” than a “Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars”.