Ordinarily, I would reject a book like Glimmer. Foul language always spoils the reading experience for me, and this book has plenty of it. But the power of Sam Aleks’s narration was too strong.
Onra Kang is an arsonist, driven by a miserable childhood into a state of numbness in which her only pleasure comes from setting things on fire. She burns trash, dumpsters, junk piles, and, her favorite media, TV sets. “I can think of no greater pleasure than the finality of flame,” Onra says. But other kinds of fire pursue her, fires that bedevil her soul.
Her only friend is an angry co-arsonist who one day brings Onra a set of painting supplies. To Onra’s surprise, a gallery owner pays her $10,000 for her first painting and urges her to create more. It is this offer, combined with her visits to a psychiatrist, that gives Onra hope of overcoming the past.
Writing exclusively from Onra’s point of view, the author pulls us into this tormented character’s world, into her filthy apartment, her burned and scarred body, her broken relationships, and her destructive actions that soon put the police on her trail. Through it all we find ourselves rooting for her to find a way out of the darkness. Hope appears in her newly found creative streak, in the construction worker who takes an interest in her, and in her realization that she has a core of strength that can save her. Whether this will come to pass is the question that drives the reader to keep turning the pages.
When I ran across this novel in a free book advertisement, I was surprised to find that it had only four Amazon reviews. Although the book suffers from occasional typos, run-on sentences, and grammatical errors that a good editor would have caught, it blazes with a tremendous narrative talent worthy of the best fiction writers.
This is not a happy story. It’s violent, ugly, deeply sorrowful, and polluted with dirty words which, combined with the grammatical problems, account for my three-star review. But if you love good writing enough to overlook all that, you’ll find Glimmer worth your time. Sam Aleks is a writer worth watching.
Chevron Ross's novels include Weapons of Remorse, The Seven-Day Resurrection, and The Samaritan's Patient. Click here for more information.