You Glow in the Dark (2024) by Liliana Colanzi

 Book Review

You Glow in the Dark (2024)

by Liliana Colanzi

Translated by Chris Andrews

    I was intrigued with the New York Times book review that described this book by Bolivian author Liliana Colanzi as being suffused with an "Andean Cyber Punk" ethos and read its 144 pages on the Kindle app on my phone over the weekend.  It's a set of connected short stories based around the Goiania accident in Brazil, which happened in 1987.   The Goiania accident happened when radioactive materials were stolen from an abandoned Brazilian hospital by a couple of local hoodlums who wanted the encasing metal unit for perceived scrap value, they dismantled the machine and then pulled out the radioactive material and passed it around the neighborhood like a real bunch of ignorant slum dwellers.  People died before it got all sorted out.

  Anyway, this isn't spelled out in the book till the end and the characters certainly don't know what is going on, so it does have a cyber-punkish air for sure.  The fact that Colanzi doesn't provide a birds-eye overview of the sequence of events and keeps to the understandings of the characters gives each story an air of mystery.