A shaggy drug story: Industry of Magic & Light, by David Keenan, reviewed

The Scottish writer David Keenan has published five novels in five years: This is Memorial Device (2017), For the Good Times (2019), Xstabeth (2020), last year’s magnum opus Monument Maker and now Industry of Magic & Light. At a comparatively modest 250 pages (Monument Maker weighed in at more than 800), it is practically a novella, or perhaps the sort of pamphlet one might once have picked up in a ‘head shop’ such as Compendium Books in Camden. The last book of Keenan’s I reviewed here I described as ‘either a cycle of novels or one vast fictional gallimaufry’ – to which I now approvingly add a third category. Industry of Magic & Light confirms the enterprise as a shaggy drug story:

Then the main band came on. I thought they had been on already. And maybe it was the LSD. But I started to get it… this music was like a split second of that music only extended forever, like a magnification of that music, I thought to myself, like an atomic vision of that music, and I thought of atoms, and of splitting the atom, and of how that was how it all had come about in the first place; and that’s when the devil appeared to me.