Description:

For generations, the marsh-surrounded town of Shimmer, Maryland has played host to a loose movement of African-American artists, all working in different media, but all utilizing the same haunting color. Landscape paintings, trompe l'oeil quilts, decorated dolls, mixed-media assemblages, and more, all featuring the same peculiar hue, a shifting pigment somewhere between purple and pink, the color of the saltmarsh orchid, a rare and indigenous flower. Graduate student Xavier Wentworth has been drawn to Shimmer, hoping to study the work of artists like quilter Hazel Whitby and landscape painter Shadrach Grayson in detail, having experienced something akin to an epiphany when viewing a Hazel Whitby tapestry as a child. Xavier will find that others, too, have been drawn to Shimmer, called by something more than art, something in the marsh itself, a mysterious, spectral hue. From Lambda Literary Award-nominated author Craig Laurance Gidney (Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories, Skin Deep Magic) comes A Spectral Hue, a novel of art, obsession, and the ghosts that haunt us all. CURATOR'S NOTE (The 2020 Pride Month Bundle) «Craig and I met at Gaylaxicon too, right before his first collection, Sea, Swallow Me came out. I fell in love with his stories when I read the book. Since then, we've met up at multiple events and I've gotten to watch him grow as a writer (and have continued to enjoy his company!) ever since. A Spectral Hue is a brilliant novel, weaving strands of art, madness, magic, queerness and identity in a story about generations of Black artists in a strange town at the edge of an even stranger marsh.» – Catherine Lundoff