Artificial Light(2006)

James GreerPamela TaylorDennis Cooper

"In 1994, a young woman named Fiat Lux donates twenty-one notebooks full of her writings to a university library and then disappears. It's only later that her close relationship with a well-known rock musician who had recently committed suicide is discovered, and the notebooks' contents become the subject of growing fascination, conjecture, and gossip. Intending to satisfy the public's insatiable curiosity about the rock star and throw light on the author's rumored involvement in his now infamous death, and, more importantly, hoping to make a case for her remarkable writings as a work of literature, the university's press has decided to publish her notebooks in a single volume under the title she had given them, Artificial Light." Set in the mythological land of Dayton, Ohio, Artificial Light is part-historical novel, part-science fiction, part-sociological study, part-murder mystery. Artificial Light may be the first American novel to treat the alternative rock scene of the 1990s as a subject for serious literature.