ISBN1931520216

Cass is a has-been photographer in her 40s who achieved momentary fame as a chronicler of the wasted punk scene in New York City in the late 1970s. Since then has been a slow slide into obscurity and despair; she's now as dead as you can be while still having a pulse.

Then she gets an offer to go to rural Maine to interview a reclusive woman photographer who once pioneered a dreamlike photography technique. Cass leaves her rancid NYC apartment for the harsh and frozen shore of Maine. There she meets a strange young man who simultaneously repels and attracts her, and a troubled teenage girl who will go missing. Those are just the first of the lunatics and psychopaths she meets. As she gets better acquainted with the townfolk, she uncovers a dark secret that stretches back to the reckless actions of mystical group of drop-outs in the late 1960s.

Cass herself is an unforgettable character who gets several very funny lines. Aside from the pleasures of accompanying such a complex person through such a spooky landscape, you learn a lot about photography in a subtle way that never slows the action. This is a precise, realistic, and haunting mystery. Longer review at BellaOnline Mystery Books (BellaOnline-dot-com).

Hasbeen photographer's horror isle.


It seems neither Hand or King make you want to rush out and book a holiday in isolated parts of Maine.

While the cover points out the story is about a character of the 70s punk era, this book is not about music or musicians at all, just a character of that era.

She became briefly famous for a photography project at a young age, and just drifted into a vaguely sordid low-rent existence afterwards.

Surprisingly, she is offered a project involving a famous artist, and not so suprisingly agrees.

Cue suspense and move towards Thomas Harris territory later in the book.


3.5 out of 5

Damaged goods. Punk music scene photographer Cass "Scary" Neary achieves a sort of aberrant notoriety with her book "Dead Girls". Drawn to the nihilistic mentality of the 70s punk movement, the drug-fueled Cass revels in anti-materialistic rebellion, careless of her body, pushing to the edge and over, increasingly drawn to the pure, if dark, images of subjects no longer animated by a life force. Enamored of the bridge between here and gone, Cass lurks with her camera in shadowy corners, filthy alleys, recording the last moments of wasted lives. Her second book barely acknowledged, Cass remains inspired by those photographers who capture the stark underbelly of the real world. Thirty years later, Neary is as disconnected as ever, living frugally, seeking respite in drugs and alcohol. When she is offered a gig interviewing her idol, the iconic photographer Aphrodite Kamestos, who lives on a secluded island off the coast of Maine, a more-seasoned Cass is drawn one more time into an adventure that is as treacherous as it is seductive.

Danger is familiar to a woman who still bears the scars of a traumatic encounter in a vacant lot ("It's always 4 a.m. beneath a broken street lamp."), her instinctively ignoring warning signs to pay homage to a long love affair with the eye of the camera, the infinite beauty of genius. Such is the early work of Aphrodite, removed from the prying eyes of hangers-on and acolytes. To be in the presence of such talent is its own reward, regardless of Aphrodite's reaction to any intrusion. From the familiar squalor of her digs in New York City, Cass plunges into the heart-stopping chill of Maine, ill-prepared but determined to garner some nugget, proof that her long search for perfection is not in vain. Genius is like fool's gold, irresistible. Accidentally meeting Aphrodite's son the night before her choppy passage to Paswegas Island, Cass is jarred by a vague intuition of danger, distracted as well by a profusion of posters of the lost, tattered notices, "Have you seen this person"? A world-weary survivor, Cass's instincts are self-serving, cynical, a driven woman whose hopefulness is buried under years of disaffection and regret, her imagined and drug-addled responses routinely confrontational.

Her passage into unfamiliar territory sprinkled with epithets, Hand's protagonist challenges us to see beyond the façade, to care about Cass in spite of her behavior, blazing through the eccentric lives of island residents, sniffing out dishonesty, danger and genius in equal measure. Island dramas tragically play out, Cass the unlikely catalyst who is more in sync with her surroundings than she will admit. In an adrenaline-shot climax, Cass meets genius and evil face to face, haunted by the hypnotic images that call to her artist's soul. A provocative and unpredictable character, Cass is compelling in her abandon, her struggle to reclaim sanity in the face of annihilation, a prickly, surprising heroine. Hand captures that most elusive of subjects, the artist's quest for the perfect, redemptive image and the chaos that attends such vision. Never ethereal or pure, this is murky territory, strewn with despair and failure, as heady as the first injection of heroin into a throbbing vein, a reckless impulse to discover the Holy Grail or know the searing touch of the hand of God. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

Elizabeth Hand ("Waking the Moon," "Mortal Love," among others), known for her poetic and utterly dark fantasies, attempts a more conventional Gothic tale this time, and succeeds beautifully. The characters are memorable; the conclusion is crisp. There are no wasted scenes.

Her protagonist, Cass Neary, a burned-out sociopathic leftover from the 1970s punk era, was "famous long ago" for a photography book in which she photographed dead people.

Now, an old friend from back in the day gives her an assignment to interview another formerly famous photographer, who lives alone on an island in Northern Maine.

Cass soon finds herself enmeshed in a world of missing teens, former hippies, ruined buildings, and mysterious animals--among other things--and Ms. Hand, with her tricky plot, dares you to figure out where she's going with the tale before she's ready to reveal the answers. (I doubt you will figure things out.)

And, along the way, some of her readers will learn a great deal about the almost vanished art of taking pictures with film cameras, while others will nod and smile, and remember the days of grainy Kodak Tri-X black and white.

I was surprised that Ms. Hand has written something so conventional, something so within the boundaries of the Gothic (I was casting the movie version in my head--something I've never done with any of this author's novels before), and equally surprised how well she brought it off.

I am new to Elizabeth Hand, and tried "Generation Loss" because of its unusual themes of Maine, art/photography, punk, and more. Hmm, what was she going to do with that? The result was crisply done, yet somewhat creepy, without a bunch of detours into background and filler that a lesser writer might have indulged in so as not to "waste" research. As two fitting examples, I learned enough about Maine and about the art scene to be interested and not overwhelmed.

Cass Neary, as the burned-out artist stumbling through life, is largely unappealing and unsympathetic. Perhaps Ms. Hand went a bit overboard there, or perhaps I am too simplistic and sentimental in preferring main characters with a positive attribute or two. Even as she gets involved in the mystery and takes decisive action, Cass is still far from angelic. That's cool, because an epiphany that changed Cass into a completely different person would have been grossly out of place.

I liked the idea of tying a plot to photography, which seemed quite fresh. Maine served as a fine backdrop, too, with local color. Who needs another art-oriented story playing out entirely in NYC or LA? Some of the edge was taken off, however, because I guessed a couple of the key secrets well before the end. Maybe I got lucky or maybe the clues were clear or maybe there weren't very many options possible. Whatever it was, that was ok, because the crispness propelled everything along to a sharp ending.