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Cass Neary #1
Generation Loss
Cass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption.
265 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2007
107 people are currently reading
4986 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Hand
186 books1,311 followersA New York Times notable and multiple award– winning author, Elizabeth Hand has written seven novels, including the cult classic Waking the Moon, and short-story collections. She is a longtime contributor to numerous publications, including the Washington Post Book World and the Village Voice Literary Supplement. She and her two children divide their time between the coast of Maine and North London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 512 reviews
March 7, 2017
In the book "Generation Loss" by Elizabeth Hand we enter the life of Cass "Scary" Neary, a self-destructive photographer. who captures on film the Punk scene of the '70's , and became famous for her efforts, as she lived the punk life and not just capture it on film.
We join her as she has become a much older uninspired investigator as Cass is now a sneering, pill-popping junkie. This may be due to Cass also being the victim of a violent rape that ended her love affair with the punk scene.
In an effort to try and re-inspire her, she is given the opportunity to travel from New York to Maine (Hand's home base), in the dead of winter, so she can interview the man who was her inspiration to become a photographer.
This is a violent and unsympathetic voyage containing unsavory characters and a really damaged main character, yet the book is brilliant, touching and cruel with what may be a slant tword the supernatural.
Elizabeth Hand avoids the usual formulas of mystery and much of the other crime stories currently available.
Highly recommended.
Small Beer Press is based in Massachusetts and would be considered a micro-publishing concern.
We join her as she has become a much older uninspired investigator as Cass is now a sneering, pill-popping junkie. This may be due to Cass also being the victim of a violent rape that ended her love affair with the punk scene.
In an effort to try and re-inspire her, she is given the opportunity to travel from New York to Maine (Hand's home base), in the dead of winter, so she can interview the man who was her inspiration to become a photographer.
This is a violent and unsympathetic voyage containing unsavory characters and a really damaged main character, yet the book is brilliant, touching and cruel with what may be a slant tword the supernatural.
Elizabeth Hand avoids the usual formulas of mystery and much of the other crime stories currently available.
Highly recommended.
Small Beer Press is based in Massachusetts and would be considered a micro-publishing concern.
January 24, 2022
My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. I’m avoiding police procedurals and standalone “women in peril'' thrillers to focus on ladies who are amateur sleuths. Generation Loss is my introduction to author Elizabeth Hand and her series featuring Cassandra Neary. Published in 2007, this novel is like the most potent medicine: tastes terrible going down but the stuff in the bottle works. Not a detective mystery, or a "catch the psycho" thriller, or literary fiction but a jagged combination of all of the above, I thought that Hand went too far a couple of times but if the hard taste had been sugarcoated, I wouldn't have liked this as much.
The novel is the first person account of Cass Neary, a forty-eight-year-old resident of the Lower East Side whose life--by her admission--has been over for decades. A photographer, her documentation of the burgeoning NYC punk rock scene of the late 1970s led to momentary recognition in the press and fleeting celebrity with a book called Dead Girls. Shooting objects at rest--a comatose junkie, say--Cass has a talent for sniffing out damage in others but has spent the last twenty years working in the stockroom of Strand Bookstore, stretching her meager paycheck to cover booze and drugs, and pushing away anyone who's cared about her.
Cass bumps into an associate named Phil Cohen, a freelance writer who other than supplying Cass with crystal meth and Adderall, looks out for her. He pitches her a job, traveling to "Paswegas Island" in eastern Maine to interview Aphrodite Kamestos, a once renowned photographer who moved off grid over thirty years ago to preside over what became a failed commune. Phil's contact apparently wants a piece on '60s photography and Aphrodite requested Cass. Needing the money and a change of scenery--her ex-girlfriend died on 9/11 before Cass could reach closure with her--she takes the job. As a connoisseur of the dead, Cass is intrigued by what Maine has to offer.
The headlines told a different story. A rash of teen suicides; support groups for people addicted to Oxy-C and vicodin; two big heroin busts. Another bomb scare at the high school. Another confirmed case of West Nile Virus. A missing persons alert for someone named Martin Graves, last seen August 29th. The police log listed three arrests for domestic assault and another for possession of crack cocaine. A body washed up in Burnt Harbor had been identified as a fisherman lost at sea the previous winter. More bodies were missing from another boat presumed lost in a recent storm. There was also a feature, "The Facts About Bear Baiting," and notice of a Benefit Bean Supper for the Proust family, who had just lost their home to a fire. Someone was still looking for her husband, last seen driving home to Machias after work at the Wal-Mart a month before.
So much for Vacationland, I thought, and went to bed.
There were so many things Elizabeth Hand does superlatively well in Generation Loss while making The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo feel like a beach read. Cass Neary (great name) doesn't start out looking for a missing person or object, so the book doesn't barrel down the highway of detective fiction with a lot of familiar signs. She's a sociopath, actually, not only smashed for much of the story but given to lying or stealing when she doesn't need to. I loved the protagonist being shaped by photography and the punk scene. Hand knows her milieu extremely well and with great confidence, finds organic ways to fit it into her plot. The writing is wonderful, really possessing the spirit of a damaged artist.
I was a hit, and I wasn't yet twenty years old.
WHO ARE THE MYSTERY GIRLS? ran the Voice headline a week after my show opened. CASSANDRA NEARY'S PUNK PROVOCATIONS. They used a detail of "St. Eulalia," cropped so you could see my bare foot and the Canal Street sign. It looked like a crime-scene photo. This wasn't a bad take, since I was being castigated in the press for everything from pornography to drug dealing.
I didn't care. I was safe behind my camera at CBGB's. I loved the rituals of processing film. I had an instinctive feel for it, how long it would take for an image to bleed from the neg onto emulsion paper. I loved playing with the negs, manipulating light and shadow and time until the world looked just right, until everything in front of me was just the way I wanted it to be.
But best of all I loved being alone in the dark with the infrared bulb, that incandescent flare when I switched the lights back on and there it was: a black-and-white print: a body, an eye, a tongue, a cunt, a prick, a hand, a tree; drunk kids racing through a side street with their eyes white like they'd seen a ghost with a gun.
This is what I lived for, me alone with these things. Not just knowing I'd seen them and taken the picture but feeling like I'd made them, like they'd never have existed without me. Nothing is like that: not sex, not drugs, not booze or sunrise off the most beautiful place you can imagine. Nothing is like knowing you can make something like that real. I felt like I was fucking God.
You read a lot of crap about photographic craftsmanship in those days, and technique, but you didn't hear shit about vision. I knew that I had an eye, a gift for seeing where the ripped edges of the world began to peel away and something else shows through. What that whole downtown scene was about, at least for a little while, was people grabbing at that frayed seam and just yanking to see what was behind it, to see what was left when everything else was torn away.
Thanks to Stephen King (name checked once by Cass), I've long been beguiled and spooked by descriptions of Maine and Generation Loss beautifully conjures that Twilight Zone mood. This novel has dangerous atmosphere to spare. Because Cass is such a degenerate, I was also propelled by needing to know what she'd get up to next and who'd catch her in the act. Rather than a plot acting on her, Cass moves the plot. I did feel that rather than do any detecting, she seemed to divine through artistic temperament who the villain was and what they were hiding, but it didn't take me out of the book. I will definitely continue with this series.
Thank you to Morgan for pulling this novel off the used bookstore rack and recommending it to me. You profiled me scarily well.
While reading, I imagined Uma Thurman as Cass Neary.
The novel is the first person account of Cass Neary, a forty-eight-year-old resident of the Lower East Side whose life--by her admission--has been over for decades. A photographer, her documentation of the burgeoning NYC punk rock scene of the late 1970s led to momentary recognition in the press and fleeting celebrity with a book called Dead Girls. Shooting objects at rest--a comatose junkie, say--Cass has a talent for sniffing out damage in others but has spent the last twenty years working in the stockroom of Strand Bookstore, stretching her meager paycheck to cover booze and drugs, and pushing away anyone who's cared about her.
Cass bumps into an associate named Phil Cohen, a freelance writer who other than supplying Cass with crystal meth and Adderall, looks out for her. He pitches her a job, traveling to "Paswegas Island" in eastern Maine to interview Aphrodite Kamestos, a once renowned photographer who moved off grid over thirty years ago to preside over what became a failed commune. Phil's contact apparently wants a piece on '60s photography and Aphrodite requested Cass. Needing the money and a change of scenery--her ex-girlfriend died on 9/11 before Cass could reach closure with her--she takes the job. As a connoisseur of the dead, Cass is intrigued by what Maine has to offer.
The headlines told a different story. A rash of teen suicides; support groups for people addicted to Oxy-C and vicodin; two big heroin busts. Another bomb scare at the high school. Another confirmed case of West Nile Virus. A missing persons alert for someone named Martin Graves, last seen August 29th. The police log listed three arrests for domestic assault and another for possession of crack cocaine. A body washed up in Burnt Harbor had been identified as a fisherman lost at sea the previous winter. More bodies were missing from another boat presumed lost in a recent storm. There was also a feature, "The Facts About Bear Baiting," and notice of a Benefit Bean Supper for the Proust family, who had just lost their home to a fire. Someone was still looking for her husband, last seen driving home to Machias after work at the Wal-Mart a month before.
So much for Vacationland, I thought, and went to bed.
There were so many things Elizabeth Hand does superlatively well in Generation Loss while making The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo feel like a beach read. Cass Neary (great name) doesn't start out looking for a missing person or object, so the book doesn't barrel down the highway of detective fiction with a lot of familiar signs. She's a sociopath, actually, not only smashed for much of the story but given to lying or stealing when she doesn't need to. I loved the protagonist being shaped by photography and the punk scene. Hand knows her milieu extremely well and with great confidence, finds organic ways to fit it into her plot. The writing is wonderful, really possessing the spirit of a damaged artist.
I was a hit, and I wasn't yet twenty years old.
WHO ARE THE MYSTERY GIRLS? ran the Voice headline a week after my show opened. CASSANDRA NEARY'S PUNK PROVOCATIONS. They used a detail of "St. Eulalia," cropped so you could see my bare foot and the Canal Street sign. It looked like a crime-scene photo. This wasn't a bad take, since I was being castigated in the press for everything from pornography to drug dealing.
I didn't care. I was safe behind my camera at CBGB's. I loved the rituals of processing film. I had an instinctive feel for it, how long it would take for an image to bleed from the neg onto emulsion paper. I loved playing with the negs, manipulating light and shadow and time until the world looked just right, until everything in front of me was just the way I wanted it to be.
But best of all I loved being alone in the dark with the infrared bulb, that incandescent flare when I switched the lights back on and there it was: a black-and-white print: a body, an eye, a tongue, a cunt, a prick, a hand, a tree; drunk kids racing through a side street with their eyes white like they'd seen a ghost with a gun.
This is what I lived for, me alone with these things. Not just knowing I'd seen them and taken the picture but feeling like I'd made them, like they'd never have existed without me. Nothing is like that: not sex, not drugs, not booze or sunrise off the most beautiful place you can imagine. Nothing is like knowing you can make something like that real. I felt like I was fucking God.
You read a lot of crap about photographic craftsmanship in those days, and technique, but you didn't hear shit about vision. I knew that I had an eye, a gift for seeing where the ripped edges of the world began to peel away and something else shows through. What that whole downtown scene was about, at least for a little while, was people grabbing at that frayed seam and just yanking to see what was behind it, to see what was left when everything else was torn away.
Thanks to Stephen King (name checked once by Cass), I've long been beguiled and spooked by descriptions of Maine and Generation Loss beautifully conjures that Twilight Zone mood. This novel has dangerous atmosphere to spare. Because Cass is such a degenerate, I was also propelled by needing to know what she'd get up to next and who'd catch her in the act. Rather than a plot acting on her, Cass moves the plot. I did feel that rather than do any detecting, she seemed to divine through artistic temperament who the villain was and what they were hiding, but it didn't take me out of the book. I will definitely continue with this series.
Thank you to Morgan for pulling this novel off the used bookstore rack and recommending it to me. You profiled me scarily well.
While reading, I imagined Uma Thurman as Cass Neary.
October 23, 2007
Had I read Elizabeth Hand's work before, I might have been very surprised at this book. When I met Elizabeth this past summer and expressed my praise for such a wonderful book, she expressed some doubt if I would like her other work as it was more standard fantasy. It was only later in a seminar about the experience of writing the book that I got a deeper glimpse into her reasoning: She hated writing this book.
I can see why. "Generation Loss" is as disturbingly beautiful as the photography the protagonist describes-- think Robert Mapplethorpe meets Man Ray-- and unabashedly self-effacing. It is quite obvious that the protagonist is based on the author herself (although, thankfully, not all of the events described therein). This kind of self-effacement can easily turn tedious, but Elizabeth never lets it sink into mere self-indulgent confession. Her shared experiences with her protagonist are merely a springboard for a great story with characters one finds compellingly human, in both positive and negative ways. "Warts and all" as they say.
Make no mistake, though, this is not standard fare fantasy, nor urban fantasy. Like all wonderful books it is hard to pin down, but I found it an intense psychological thriller with just-on-the-edge-of-surrealism twists very reminiscent of Night Gallery or The Twilight Zone at their very best, with some hard-edged cynicism to keep it all from straying from frighteningly believable.
I still haven't read any of her other works. Ms. Hand said in her talk that she wanted so many times to reach for her standard fantasy tropes to move the story along, but resisted. As a result we are given a rarity-- that wonderful thing that comes from an artist willing to stretch herself beyond her comfort zone and stay there until the job is done.
I can see why. "Generation Loss" is as disturbingly beautiful as the photography the protagonist describes-- think Robert Mapplethorpe meets Man Ray-- and unabashedly self-effacing. It is quite obvious that the protagonist is based on the author herself (although, thankfully, not all of the events described therein). This kind of self-effacement can easily turn tedious, but Elizabeth never lets it sink into mere self-indulgent confession. Her shared experiences with her protagonist are merely a springboard for a great story with characters one finds compellingly human, in both positive and negative ways. "Warts and all" as they say.
Make no mistake, though, this is not standard fare fantasy, nor urban fantasy. Like all wonderful books it is hard to pin down, but I found it an intense psychological thriller with just-on-the-edge-of-surrealism twists very reminiscent of Night Gallery or The Twilight Zone at their very best, with some hard-edged cynicism to keep it all from straying from frighteningly believable.
I still haven't read any of her other works. Ms. Hand said in her talk that she wanted so many times to reach for her standard fantasy tropes to move the story along, but resisted. As a result we are given a rarity-- that wonderful thing that comes from an artist willing to stretch herself beyond her comfort zone and stay there until the job is done.
August 20, 2016
I get all the Elizabeths with the four-letter last names confused, and I thought I had tried Elizabeth Hand already. Nope. (It was probably Elizabeth Bear but there is also an Elizabeth Moon.) When Jeff VanderMeer gave a glowing review to the most recent Cass Neary book, I felt I missed something and got the first book in the series immediately.
Fantastic. Darker and grittier than I expected, loved Cass, loved the hint at potential supernatural elements that may just be the side effect of a drug-addled mind (or maybe not), love the setting of bleakest remotest island Maine in the winter, love the art elements. I got up early and went late to work so that I could finish it. I haven't needed to read a book straight through like that for a long time. Only sleep got in the way.
This book was discussed on Episode 062 of the Reading Envy Podcast.
Fantastic. Darker and grittier than I expected, loved Cass, loved the hint at potential supernatural elements that may just be the side effect of a drug-addled mind (or maybe not), love the setting of bleakest remotest island Maine in the winter, love the art elements. I got up early and went late to work so that I could finish it. I haven't needed to read a book straight through like that for a long time. Only sleep got in the way.
This book was discussed on Episode 062 of the Reading Envy Podcast.
September 13, 2020
Generation loss - that's what happens when you endlessly reproduce a photographic image. You lose authenticity, the quality deteriorates in each subsequent generation that's copied from the original negative, and the original itself decays with time, so that every new image is a more degraded version of what you started with.
This was absolutely fantastic - I can't believe I've never run into this author before, but what a knockout of a book this was. It reminded me at times of Nicola Griffith's Aud Torvingen series - Cass Neary and Aud have plenty in common, but it's the spare writing that really caused echoes for me, each line minimal and without flowery excess, but perfect.
There's plenty of difference between the two though - both Generation Loss and Cass are harder, sharper at the edges than Griffith's heroine and series. Cass is harder to like, a punk who's lost the vital spark and is happy to bury it further under drugs and dead-end jobs and numbness. But there's glimmers of that life trying to fight back, mostly when she gets her camera out, but also in the occasional human connection she makes over the course of the book.
The plot itself pulled me right in, despite feeling almost accidental - there's no setting out to solve anything here, that would require much too much active interest in the world around, and Cass is a heroine who waits for moments, rather than causing them. But it didn't put me off. It felt organic, the way the links chained towards the conclusion, and Elizabeth Hand keeps it at a comfortable pace without allowing it to meander or rush.
This just feels like one of those books where everything in it could have gone so horribly wrong, but having found the balance it did, it's a rare and wonderful experience. So looking forward to the rest of this series!
This was absolutely fantastic - I can't believe I've never run into this author before, but what a knockout of a book this was. It reminded me at times of Nicola Griffith's Aud Torvingen series - Cass Neary and Aud have plenty in common, but it's the spare writing that really caused echoes for me, each line minimal and without flowery excess, but perfect.
There's plenty of difference between the two though - both Generation Loss and Cass are harder, sharper at the edges than Griffith's heroine and series. Cass is harder to like, a punk who's lost the vital spark and is happy to bury it further under drugs and dead-end jobs and numbness. But there's glimmers of that life trying to fight back, mostly when she gets her camera out, but also in the occasional human connection she makes over the course of the book.
The plot itself pulled me right in, despite feeling almost accidental - there's no setting out to solve anything here, that would require much too much active interest in the world around, and Cass is a heroine who waits for moments, rather than causing them. But it didn't put me off. It felt organic, the way the links chained towards the conclusion, and Elizabeth Hand keeps it at a comfortable pace without allowing it to meander or rush.
This just feels like one of those books where everything in it could have gone so horribly wrong, but having found the balance it did, it's a rare and wonderful experience. So looking forward to the rest of this series!
May 31, 2021
I did not like this mystery thriller, ‘Generation Loss’ in so many ways until page 150! The author Elizabeth Hand has written a mystery story with strong literary novel overtones. But Hand spends too much time to suit me setting up the action and characters for two-thirds of the book. But it IS done in a wonderfully crafted atmosphere of gloom, rain, dark forests, grim rocky islands, and tons of mysterious and vaguely threatening characters her heroine meets on what is clearly her adventure into the underworld of Maine. The atmosphere is similar that in ancient Greek myths about walkabouts in Hades and seeing lost dead loved ones.
'Generation Loss' has a very unlikeable heroine to me. Cass Neary pushes ALL of my buttons. Unfortunately, much of the story involves her popping pills and drinking throughout all of her scenes, and she is an UGLY drunk.
There are those of us who experience something evil once - and worse, over and over - so, we are left with genuine lifelong damage to our minds and/or bodies. Most of us do our best with what is left. Others look for havens where other damaged people live and try to recreate a family and a life.
Then there are those who discover they crave the feeling of emotional pain and victimhood so much they can't let it go. Cass Neary, the main protagonist of 'Generation Loss', is one of these. She enthusiastically eats pain 24/7.
Unfortunately, gentle reader, I have a very strong reaction of revulsion to people like this after decades of useless caring for, and wanting to be cared by, of such a one. This person scarred me more deeply than any other person I have ever known - I was a child, and collateral damage, in her wake. Why, oh why do they act so?
Cass Neary, middle-aged artist photographer and the 'heroine' of this series, uses massive amounts of drugs and alcohol to force her senses into an unreality similar to psychotic state. She wants to live in a bleary nightmare of damage, rage, chaos and destruction. When Cass turned to the 'punk' subculture in her twenties, which was a music, art and drug culture of self-immolation years ago, I wasn't the least bit surprised. She is not a punk wannabee - she is the real thing, a Syd Vicious clone (Sex Pistols https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_V...).
Instead of the usual responses to trauma - withdrawal, numbness, depression, PTSD symptoms, or, as some others do, become overly controlling and brittle, determined to make sure their environment is hugely normal or safe - folks like Cass use her damaged temperament and mental illness as an excuse for indulging herself in an orgy of bad decisions which hurt herself and anyone nearby who are inexperienced with these types of souls.
I hate Cass Neary, genuine victim of fate and crime though she may have been. She is now a hedonistic narcissist, who uses excessive substance abuse and self-created suffering to hide from responsibility, self-knowledge, personal growth and all emotion. All the while she is telling herself she is of an elect elite that sees the painfully too-bright truth of life (which is usually about the specter of Death coming at you like a freight train) through a so-called refined high-quality lens of Artistic Temperament. Of course this viewpoint is a distortion of truth, like all self-perceptions. Reality is in the eye of the beholder - but photography is another layer of perception between the eye, brain and the real world, and obviously easy to photoshop into any shape of truth one wants to see.
I know, I know, Art can reveal meanings hidden to the eye and heart, but still, it shapes meaning, full stop. Art is wonderful if one uses it to examine or find Truth or to express or release dark corners to educate or explore, or have fun even, but using it to indulge oneself in depravity is well, depraved, especially if one must kill or torture another for arty pleasure.
Cass uses any opportunity of dead roadkill, literally, which crosses her path to send herself into a rapture of delicious horror, stunned by the emotional power of cooling bodies. She is stuck in a cycle of photographing unexpected deaths whether accidental or arranged, whether real or modeled. It is not only an obsession. Unlike most of us, I hope, Cass loves looking at death, her one overwhelming delight in her life, for emotional sustenance. It is some sort of freaky aesthetically sensual delight better than sex or food or danger to her.
What does Cass want to see? Cass wants to see Death with lipstick on. She wants to capture Artistic Beauty in dead bleeding broken and rotting things. Beautiful Death is what she pursues in her photographic Art. Actually, this pursuit isn't that unusual in the Art World, but Cass is mixing her genuine taste for macabre 'Truth' with erasing herself in a sensory paradise of obliviousness. She prefers staggering by living breathing people with an alcohol-blur and drug-buzzed hearing. She stinks of filth and is too morally offensive for anyone who is alive to approach. She smells and acts like she is a putrefying dead monster recently dug out of her own grave purely for the hidden motive of avoiding any truthful self-examination. She is only a collection of animal needs, reduced by substance abuse.
This is why I hate her.
I know, artists get to the heart of truth often through a distorted lens. But I hate people who are intentionally brutally making themselves oblivious like Cass. These people often flail about destroying their humanity and that of their friends, family, and children, often because it isn't Truth they actually seek, but overwhelming depravity.
Hand knows this character inside and out, as do I. Bigger question, could I stand this character long enough to finish it?
Yes, I did. Once page 150 is reached, the thrills begin, the mystery opens up and Cass figures out what is going on. Early in the book she photographs a dead junkie in the streets of New York City, using an entire roll of film, without calling the police, no concern for human dignity, to enjoy the dead body 'artfully’. Even after she decides to attempt to move past her social passivity and self-involvement, for a minute, Cass is desperate to return to her dark cave of personal degradation through chemical decadence.
Cass is not redeemed. Perhaps, gentle reader, this is a spoiler, but, I suspect that is the hook of this series.
After finishing the novel, I still dislike her drunken self-pity. For those readers who have never known a chronic drunk, chronic alcoholism freezes a person’s emotional development in time and any mental processing of pain, self-doubt or hatred. The chronic drunk is heartless and pure narcissistic self-interest. I am acutely aware of the chronic drunk’s collateral damage of other people.
Anyway. I am curious enough to read the next in the series. The person I knew like this died, giving up depravity only because of physical disability.
'Generation Loss' has a very unlikeable heroine to me. Cass Neary pushes ALL of my buttons. Unfortunately, much of the story involves her popping pills and drinking throughout all of her scenes, and she is an UGLY drunk.
There are those of us who experience something evil once - and worse, over and over - so, we are left with genuine lifelong damage to our minds and/or bodies. Most of us do our best with what is left. Others look for havens where other damaged people live and try to recreate a family and a life.
Then there are those who discover they crave the feeling of emotional pain and victimhood so much they can't let it go. Cass Neary, the main protagonist of 'Generation Loss', is one of these. She enthusiastically eats pain 24/7.
Unfortunately, gentle reader, I have a very strong reaction of revulsion to people like this after decades of useless caring for, and wanting to be cared by, of such a one. This person scarred me more deeply than any other person I have ever known - I was a child, and collateral damage, in her wake. Why, oh why do they act so?
Cass Neary, middle-aged artist photographer and the 'heroine' of this series, uses massive amounts of drugs and alcohol to force her senses into an unreality similar to psychotic state. She wants to live in a bleary nightmare of damage, rage, chaos and destruction. When Cass turned to the 'punk' subculture in her twenties, which was a music, art and drug culture of self-immolation years ago, I wasn't the least bit surprised. She is not a punk wannabee - she is the real thing, a Syd Vicious clone (Sex Pistols https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_V...).
Instead of the usual responses to trauma - withdrawal, numbness, depression, PTSD symptoms, or, as some others do, become overly controlling and brittle, determined to make sure their environment is hugely normal or safe - folks like Cass use her damaged temperament and mental illness as an excuse for indulging herself in an orgy of bad decisions which hurt herself and anyone nearby who are inexperienced with these types of souls.
I hate Cass Neary, genuine victim of fate and crime though she may have been. She is now a hedonistic narcissist, who uses excessive substance abuse and self-created suffering to hide from responsibility, self-knowledge, personal growth and all emotion. All the while she is telling herself she is of an elect elite that sees the painfully too-bright truth of life (which is usually about the specter of Death coming at you like a freight train) through a so-called refined high-quality lens of Artistic Temperament. Of course this viewpoint is a distortion of truth, like all self-perceptions. Reality is in the eye of the beholder - but photography is another layer of perception between the eye, brain and the real world, and obviously easy to photoshop into any shape of truth one wants to see.
I know, I know, Art can reveal meanings hidden to the eye and heart, but still, it shapes meaning, full stop. Art is wonderful if one uses it to examine or find Truth or to express or release dark corners to educate or explore, or have fun even, but using it to indulge oneself in depravity is well, depraved, especially if one must kill or torture another for arty pleasure.
Cass uses any opportunity of dead roadkill, literally, which crosses her path to send herself into a rapture of delicious horror, stunned by the emotional power of cooling bodies. She is stuck in a cycle of photographing unexpected deaths whether accidental or arranged, whether real or modeled. It is not only an obsession. Unlike most of us, I hope, Cass loves looking at death, her one overwhelming delight in her life, for emotional sustenance. It is some sort of freaky aesthetically sensual delight better than sex or food or danger to her.
What does Cass want to see? Cass wants to see Death with lipstick on. She wants to capture Artistic Beauty in dead bleeding broken and rotting things. Beautiful Death is what she pursues in her photographic Art. Actually, this pursuit isn't that unusual in the Art World, but Cass is mixing her genuine taste for macabre 'Truth' with erasing herself in a sensory paradise of obliviousness. She prefers staggering by living breathing people with an alcohol-blur and drug-buzzed hearing. She stinks of filth and is too morally offensive for anyone who is alive to approach. She smells and acts like she is a putrefying dead monster recently dug out of her own grave purely for the hidden motive of avoiding any truthful self-examination. She is only a collection of animal needs, reduced by substance abuse.
This is why I hate her.
I know, artists get to the heart of truth often through a distorted lens. But I hate people who are intentionally brutally making themselves oblivious like Cass. These people often flail about destroying their humanity and that of their friends, family, and children, often because it isn't Truth they actually seek, but overwhelming depravity.
Hand knows this character inside and out, as do I. Bigger question, could I stand this character long enough to finish it?
Yes, I did. Once page 150 is reached, the thrills begin, the mystery opens up and Cass figures out what is going on. Early in the book she photographs a dead junkie in the streets of New York City, using an entire roll of film, without calling the police, no concern for human dignity, to enjoy the dead body 'artfully’. Even after she decides to attempt to move past her social passivity and self-involvement, for a minute, Cass is desperate to return to her dark cave of personal degradation through chemical decadence.
Cass is not redeemed. Perhaps, gentle reader, this is a spoiler, but, I suspect that is the hook of this series.
After finishing the novel, I still dislike her drunken self-pity. For those readers who have never known a chronic drunk, chronic alcoholism freezes a person’s emotional development in time and any mental processing of pain, self-doubt or hatred. The chronic drunk is heartless and pure narcissistic self-interest. I am acutely aware of the chronic drunk’s collateral damage of other people.
Anyway. I am curious enough to read the next in the series. The person I knew like this died, giving up depravity only because of physical disability.
April 10, 2021
Now that is how you write a compelling, sympathetic character who is messed up and self-destructive. I loved the gorgeous, effective writing, the subtle creeping up on you mystery, and Hand's evocative images and setting (the coast of Maine). I also loved how this book is deeply uninterested in respectability politics for queer characters. I will definitely be continuing with this series.
October 1, 2020
CW:
4.5 Stars
I see you
Well of course this won the first ever Shirley Jackson award!
I loved the gothic elements that created quite a creepy and atmospheric read. Cass is a washed up photographer whose penchant for drugs and alcohol after the loss of her lover, Christine, make her a damaged and disturbed main character. Her obsession with death as the main subject in her artwork makes us as Readers feel quite uneasy about her from the beginning.
It is important to know that this is a slow burn which was crucial in order for the layers of Cass’ character to be peeled back to reveal the dark truth of her. So for some it will feel like the story is kind of meandering along until ‘the good bits’. But seriously, you have to get to the point where you are unsure what choices she will make when confronted with a darkness greater than the one inside her.
The writing is so good and the clever weaving in of symbols and imagery throughout creates an increasingly ominous feeling as the novel progresses.
You and me, we carry the dead on our backs.
Thank you Fiona for your great review that drew this book to my attention. I thought it was incredible.
4.5 Stars
I see you
Well of course this won the first ever Shirley Jackson award!
I loved the gothic elements that created quite a creepy and atmospheric read. Cass is a washed up photographer whose penchant for drugs and alcohol after the loss of her lover, Christine, make her a damaged and disturbed main character. Her obsession with death as the main subject in her artwork makes us as Readers feel quite uneasy about her from the beginning.
It is important to know that this is a slow burn which was crucial in order for the layers of Cass’ character to be peeled back to reveal the dark truth of her. So for some it will feel like the story is kind of meandering along until ‘the good bits’. But seriously, you have to get to the point where you are unsure what choices she will make when confronted with a darkness greater than the one inside her.
The writing is so good and the clever weaving in of symbols and imagery throughout creates an increasingly ominous feeling as the novel progresses.
You and me, we carry the dead on our backs.
Thank you Fiona for your great review that drew this book to my attention. I thought it was incredible.
October 21, 2021
I don’t write reviews.
I’ve never read Hand before. In fact I ignored Wylding Hall. However, the description I happened upon regarding Generation Loss told of a photographer. One who instantly reminded me of Arbus and Mapplethorpe, etc. Ok, Hand, you got me.
She might have caught me, but I enjoyed the trap. Cass is terrible and true. It all felt very cool and strange and hip, to those in the know.
The ending was a bit of a letdown. I wanted something bigger and far more elaborate. I can’t complain though. The weather grew colder as I read this and I felt the chill of Northern Maine. Good evening reading.
I’ve never read Hand before. In fact I ignored Wylding Hall. However, the description I happened upon regarding Generation Loss told of a photographer. One who instantly reminded me of Arbus and Mapplethorpe, etc. Ok, Hand, you got me.
She might have caught me, but I enjoyed the trap. Cass is terrible and true. It all felt very cool and strange and hip, to those in the know.
The ending was a bit of a letdown. I wanted something bigger and far more elaborate. I can’t complain though. The weather grew colder as I read this and I felt the chill of Northern Maine. Good evening reading.
October 7, 2016
An aging punk-rock photographer travels to Maine, aka Vacationland, to visit a brilliant reclusive artist who hasn't spoken in decades -- and discovers a world of weirdness and horror. The meditation on seeing, and how the observer changes what is seen, is brilliant, and so is the the extended metaphor for photography as a way of turning light and time into images. Cass Neary is a brilliantly unpredictable fuckup, great protagonist.
June 29, 2022
3.5
A reread from 10 years ago. The first in the Cass Neary series, which should become a streaming series at some point in the future. This one feels the most autobiographical, and takes a while to get going. Part one builds the character who becomes an integral part of the story in part two. Hand’s sense of place is absorbing, if not wholly comfortable. She doesn’t judge the people around her, or should I say she judges them as an insider would. And her sense of these people who live on the margins in Maine feels simpatico. But, she warns us early on, she’s drawn to damage. She doesn’t apologize for it, she accepts it as fact, and let’s us know, as a foreshadowing. I never saw what was coming, although on a reread I wonder if others would. Still, it’s effective. Whatever you want to say, I previously gave this 3 stars, but I also never forgot it.
A reread from 10 years ago. The first in the Cass Neary series, which should become a streaming series at some point in the future. This one feels the most autobiographical, and takes a while to get going. Part one builds the character who becomes an integral part of the story in part two. Hand’s sense of place is absorbing, if not wholly comfortable. She doesn’t judge the people around her, or should I say she judges them as an insider would. And her sense of these people who live on the margins in Maine feels simpatico. But, she warns us early on, she’s drawn to damage. She doesn’t apologize for it, she accepts it as fact, and let’s us know, as a foreshadowing. I never saw what was coming, although on a reread I wonder if others would. Still, it’s effective. Whatever you want to say, I previously gave this 3 stars, but I also never forgot it.
March 24, 2012
Finally. Eureka. A strong female lead, a middle aged single woman whose existenz isn’t defined with the platitudes of a man hunt. OK, so she’s a junkie and an alcoholic – her main love in life is Jack Daniels and Corona.
Actually, that IS her life, now: questing from hit to hit, focused on the singularity of a microscopic raison d’etre in order to avert, no subvert, a kaleidoscope of opportunity costs, each one destined to crystallise an actuality of failed possibility.
Cass Neary is strummed of despair, unpotentialised, raw: a woman obsessed with death, a mind negotiating subreality as a genre, an artiste photographer who dagguerotypes instead of digitalises: 220/120 on the 1970s NYC Lower pulse: so, a supernova in the making.
This woman rocks.
Actually, I’ve seen this early woman before, this woman who vaguely sonorifies her autobiography: Chris Kraus and Jane de Lynn might have been her drinking buddies in CBGS. But the latter two:, well, when the music stops and the chairs are taken, what do they do? The first starts obsessing over a man. The second, over a woman. But Cass Neary? Jack Daniels and a phot-shoot. Please. Hell, yeah.
NEways. Off to Maine she goes, to interview a reclusive octogenarian photographer. Shit happens. I want to focus on the man here. Although Cass is equal opportunities when it comes to the whole birds and bees things: any representative of the homo sapiens race will do.
But the man. There IS a man, but nothing happens. My point being that this is what we have come to in modern literature: to signify existential love, it is pre-requisite to NOT fuck. Screwing is only allowed when you’re not invested. Any real feelings have to be recontextualised through abstinence. Sad, but not surprising. In a zeitgeist where ‘something for the weekend, sir?’ has morphed into a daily ritual of ‘hows your father’, how does one express emoticons? Through self denial, of course. See the sense?
Oh, Cass.
I'm still on a high from this book: 24 hours after finishing, and I still can't start a new book.
Actually, that IS her life, now: questing from hit to hit, focused on the singularity of a microscopic raison d’etre in order to avert, no subvert, a kaleidoscope of opportunity costs, each one destined to crystallise an actuality of failed possibility.
Cass Neary is strummed of despair, unpotentialised, raw: a woman obsessed with death, a mind negotiating subreality as a genre, an artiste photographer who dagguerotypes instead of digitalises: 220/120 on the 1970s NYC Lower pulse: so, a supernova in the making.
This woman rocks.
Actually, I’ve seen this early woman before, this woman who vaguely sonorifies her autobiography: Chris Kraus and Jane de Lynn might have been her drinking buddies in CBGS. But the latter two:, well, when the music stops and the chairs are taken, what do they do? The first starts obsessing over a man. The second, over a woman. But Cass Neary? Jack Daniels and a phot-shoot. Please. Hell, yeah.
NEways. Off to Maine she goes, to interview a reclusive octogenarian photographer. Shit happens. I want to focus on the man here. Although Cass is equal opportunities when it comes to the whole birds and bees things: any representative of the homo sapiens race will do.
But the man. There IS a man, but nothing happens. My point being that this is what we have come to in modern literature: to signify existential love, it is pre-requisite to NOT fuck. Screwing is only allowed when you’re not invested. Any real feelings have to be recontextualised through abstinence. Sad, but not surprising. In a zeitgeist where ‘something for the weekend, sir?’ has morphed into a daily ritual of ‘hows your father’, how does one express emoticons? Through self denial, of course. See the sense?
Oh, Cass.
I'm still on a high from this book: 24 hours after finishing, and I still can't start a new book.
February 21, 2013
I don't know how to feel about this book. I don't feel objective, which is funny given how much Generation Loss is about the intersection of art and consumer. As a love letter for Maine isolated weirdness that people from Away don't get to see, it's amazing. (Content warning: I talk about rape behind the cut.)
The identity of the murderer is pretty obvious within the first third of the book. It's not so much a mystery about murder as it is about Cass, and I didn't care enough about her to be emotionally invested.
The identity of the murderer is pretty obvious within the first third of the book. It's not so much a mystery about murder as it is about Cass, and I didn't care enough about her to be emotionally invested.
May 12, 2015
I would've been much more into Generation Loss if Hand didn't take 200 pages to get the plot going somewhere and didn't meander in the meantime on overlong explanations about the wonders of photography or photographic artists and the continuing drug abuse of Cass Neary, the main character. It just got a bit old, and I didn't really get into what some reviewers seem to consider the beauty of the book (or of the Maine coast). To me it just sounded grim and lifeless, and while there isn't anything wrong with that, I just wasn't woo'd by what the writer was trying to sell me (often through the narrator's voice). Maybe you need to have been there. Or not ever have been in a desolate place (say, the Finnish countryside) so that it sounds more magical.
The last 50 pages or so (the 100 pages in between were, well, something in between) were pretty good, although the discovery that lead to the reveal was super obvious. Cass's amazement felt like a joke. The climax was also a little too much like an action movie for my taste. Nevertheless, the ending saved the book for me a bit. I don't read all that much crime/murder mystery literature, but I do like the suspense and storytelling of the genre when it's mixed with good drama (Gone Girl comes to mind). With this one, the suspense wasn't really there until page 250 or so. Maybe there was an ominous mood, but since the prose wasn't really that captivating it just felt pointless until the story actually got somewhere.
In a way I liked the main character because she was so fucked up and clearly not any kind of hero, but not your regular Clint-Eastwood-anti-hero either. The way that Cass keeps on making mistakes and doing stupid shit was different and sometimes funny, making some events feel almost like a black comedy. One rather huge problem that I had with the main character was that it was impossible to buy that she was 45, I kept imagining at most a 32-year-old woman, but that may have been because of my own preconceived notions (the Lisbeth Salander comparisons, while inaccurate, don't help). It also felt like her narration was often too wordy and stable (prose-wise) for someone who's spent the last 25 years basically wasted and drugged.
I might be interested in the sequel, but almost every aspect of the writing would have to be stronger. The characters are good, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
The last 50 pages or so (the 100 pages in between were, well, something in between) were pretty good, although the discovery that lead to the reveal was super obvious. Cass's amazement felt like a joke. The climax was also a little too much like an action movie for my taste. Nevertheless, the ending saved the book for me a bit. I don't read all that much crime/murder mystery literature, but I do like the suspense and storytelling of the genre when it's mixed with good drama (Gone Girl comes to mind). With this one, the suspense wasn't really there until page 250 or so. Maybe there was an ominous mood, but since the prose wasn't really that captivating it just felt pointless until the story actually got somewhere.
In a way I liked the main character because she was so fucked up and clearly not any kind of hero, but not your regular Clint-Eastwood-anti-hero either. The way that Cass keeps on making mistakes and doing stupid shit was different and sometimes funny, making some events feel almost like a black comedy. One rather huge problem that I had with the main character was that it was impossible to buy that she was 45, I kept imagining at most a 32-year-old woman, but that may have been because of my own preconceived notions (the Lisbeth Salander comparisons, while inaccurate, don't help). It also felt like her narration was often too wordy and stable (prose-wise) for someone who's spent the last 25 years basically wasted and drugged.
I might be interested in the sequel, but almost every aspect of the writing would have to be stronger. The characters are good, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
February 6, 2009
Generation Loss is impossible to put down, in the same way that it's impossible to refrain from poking a beached dead seal with a stick: repellent but compelling. Hand combines a bunch of unlikely elements - an aging meth head, a famous photographer, a serial killer, an artists' commune, a sullen teenager, and the lonely, tangled wilds of the Maine coast - into a lean and perfect tale about endurance and redemption. A beautiful and unsettling book.
December 12, 2020
Imaginative and dark, Generation Loss features a tough, self-destructive character. It's brilliantly written, atmospheric, and memorable. A terrific read.
July 5, 2022
Cass Neary ist eine wirklich taffe Heldin, die in ihrem Leben viel Übles durchgemacht hat. Mit Alkohol und Drogen, ihren ständigen Begleitern, betäubt sie ihre Schmerzen soweit, dass sie einigermaßen eine Randexistenz führen kann. Die Zeiten als gefeierte Punk-Fotografin liegen schon ein halbes Leben zurück, als sie den Auftrag bekommt, auf einer Insel vor Maine eine andere Kultfotografin zu interviewen.
Konfrontiert wird Cass mit einer winterlich-trostlosen Landschaft (wohin die Schwermut geht, um allein zu sein), verschwundenen Tieren und Menschen und einer alkoholkranken Fotografin, die sich nicht von ihr interviewen lassen will.
Beeindruckt hat mich die Schilderung der Küsten- und Insellandschaft vor Maine. Cass friert sich den Arsch ab und meisten kommt zur Kälte auch noch Sturm und Regen. Elizabeth Hand schildert das so intensiv, dass ich beim Lesen (im Hochsommer) das Gefühl hatte, ich bräuchte eine warme Wolldecke.
Während Cass die ganze Zeit unter Strom steht und Witterung und Jahreszeit die Story existenziell grundieren, wird sie immer tiefer in die dunklen Geheimnisse und Mysterien der Insel und ihrer Bewohner hineingezogen, bis es schließlich zu einem brutalen Showdown kommt.
Eingewoben in die Story ist unter anderem ein enormes Wissen über Fotografie und ihre Geschichte. Wie das Wetter spielt die Fotografie eine wesentliche Rolle im Buch und ich habe vieles spannende darüber gelernt (z.B. warum nicht nur die Hutmacher des 19. Jahrhunderts, sondern auch die Daguerreotypisten verrückt waren).
Konfrontiert wird Cass mit einer winterlich-trostlosen Landschaft (wohin die Schwermut geht, um allein zu sein), verschwundenen Tieren und Menschen und einer alkoholkranken Fotografin, die sich nicht von ihr interviewen lassen will.
Beeindruckt hat mich die Schilderung der Küsten- und Insellandschaft vor Maine. Cass friert sich den Arsch ab und meisten kommt zur Kälte auch noch Sturm und Regen. Elizabeth Hand schildert das so intensiv, dass ich beim Lesen (im Hochsommer) das Gefühl hatte, ich bräuchte eine warme Wolldecke.
Während Cass die ganze Zeit unter Strom steht und Witterung und Jahreszeit die Story existenziell grundieren, wird sie immer tiefer in die dunklen Geheimnisse und Mysterien der Insel und ihrer Bewohner hineingezogen, bis es schließlich zu einem brutalen Showdown kommt.
Eingewoben in die Story ist unter anderem ein enormes Wissen über Fotografie und ihre Geschichte. Wie das Wetter spielt die Fotografie eine wesentliche Rolle im Buch und ich habe vieles spannende darüber gelernt (z.B. warum nicht nur die Hutmacher des 19. Jahrhunderts, sondern auch die Daguerreotypisten verrückt waren).
June 1, 2016
Very leisurely paced character driven suspense mystery. The author did a brilliant job with the protagonist. Cass Neary is NOT sympathetic likable character. She's not only flawed, she is seriously messed up. The author took a good bit of time delving into Cass, which was well done and did not deter from the rest of the novel in anyway. The climax of the novel was very suspenseful and kept me riveted to the page. Very enjoyable and I think I'd give the sequel a shot as well.
October 11, 2018
Wow. This book was less than sub par. So cliche and poorly written. I’m astonished by all the five star ratings. Clearly those people have very low expectations for mystery novels. So many eye roll worthy moments that were unbearably forced. Horrible book club choice (not made by me).
September 21, 2012
I first encountered Elizabeth Hand via her debut novel,
Winterlong
. I thought it was great, if a bit opaque, and I liked her subsequent books,
Æstival Tide
and
Icarus Descending
, almost as much. Slightly earlier, I had also discovered similar writer Richard Grant, and was surprised to find they were a couple. I liked them both, but in my mind, both went wrong when they started writing less SFF and more contemporary, real world fantasy. In Hand's case, with
Glimmering
.
In Generation Loss, Cass Neary, a small-town girl turned big-city punk photographer has spent twenty years doing drugs, having sex, and having once been slightly famous. She heads to Maine to interview a more famous has-been photographer, and things go bad.
Cass is an amoral, unlikeable character. That can work fine, especially in third person. Hand, though, uses a first person perspective, and she doesn't pull it off. Cass goes around doing amoral things, but there's never any reflection or introspection that explains why. She clearly recognizes that, for example, stealing and hiding someone's car keys is not a good thing to do, but she does it anyway. Aside from plot convenience, we never learn why she does it or how she feels about it. It's just one of those things - she's outwardly a bad person. Again, that might work, except that we're seeing the action from her point of view, and she appears to have no opinion about it.
Hand seems to go out of her way to concoct a stereotype - gritty, dark, and pretentious all at once. Must the music be Patti Smith and John Coltrane? Despite her limited life of drugs and sex, Cass seems to have managed to learn a lot about not only photography, but furniture and wine. She walks into one room in a decrepit house on a Maine island, and we learn that it's full of "Twentieth Century Danish Modern furniture. Arne Jacobsen chairs, a cane and bamboo Jacobsen Slug chair, a beautifully spare Klint dining table." To be honest, I don't know or care what any of this is. But I find it hard to accept that a ne'er do well who's spent her life in crappy apartments can pick all this out at a glance. Hand seems to feel the need to drop names - especially in photography. This is more excusable, since the protagonist is a photographer. But in the space of four paragraphs, she mentions: Warhol, Schnabel, Koons, Curtins; Chris Mars, Joe Coleman; Lori Field, Nick Blinko; Fred Ressler, Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, Lee Friedlander, Brian Belott, Branka Jukic. I don't know who most of these people are. I'm sure it's fun for photography and modern art aficionados, but to an average reader, it's overkill. I got the point way back - Cass knows photography.
Despite all this, and a plot that seems to cry out "Make me into a horror film, please!", there's no denying Hand's stylistic skill. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, Generation Loss is well written. It was more than enough to get me to finish the book with some enjoyment. It's not enough to get me interested in the sequel, out next year. In fact, much as I admire her writing, and much as I approve of doing new things, I'm not sure I'm in Hand's audience any more.
In brief - if you're looking for a return to Hand's early work, look elsewhere. If you want gritty, dark, well written horror, this is the book for you, especially if you're excited about photography.
In Generation Loss, Cass Neary, a small-town girl turned big-city punk photographer has spent twenty years doing drugs, having sex, and having once been slightly famous. She heads to Maine to interview a more famous has-been photographer, and things go bad.
Cass is an amoral, unlikeable character. That can work fine, especially in third person. Hand, though, uses a first person perspective, and she doesn't pull it off. Cass goes around doing amoral things, but there's never any reflection or introspection that explains why. She clearly recognizes that, for example, stealing and hiding someone's car keys is not a good thing to do, but she does it anyway. Aside from plot convenience, we never learn why she does it or how she feels about it. It's just one of those things - she's outwardly a bad person. Again, that might work, except that we're seeing the action from her point of view, and she appears to have no opinion about it.
Hand seems to go out of her way to concoct a stereotype - gritty, dark, and pretentious all at once. Must the music be Patti Smith and John Coltrane? Despite her limited life of drugs and sex, Cass seems to have managed to learn a lot about not only photography, but furniture and wine. She walks into one room in a decrepit house on a Maine island, and we learn that it's full of "Twentieth Century Danish Modern furniture. Arne Jacobsen chairs, a cane and bamboo Jacobsen Slug chair, a beautifully spare Klint dining table." To be honest, I don't know or care what any of this is. But I find it hard to accept that a ne'er do well who's spent her life in crappy apartments can pick all this out at a glance. Hand seems to feel the need to drop names - especially in photography. This is more excusable, since the protagonist is a photographer. But in the space of four paragraphs, she mentions: Warhol, Schnabel, Koons, Curtins; Chris Mars, Joe Coleman; Lori Field, Nick Blinko; Fred Ressler, Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, Lee Friedlander, Brian Belott, Branka Jukic. I don't know who most of these people are. I'm sure it's fun for photography and modern art aficionados, but to an average reader, it's overkill. I got the point way back - Cass knows photography.
Despite all this, and a plot that seems to cry out "Make me into a horror film, please!", there's no denying Hand's stylistic skill. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, Generation Loss is well written. It was more than enough to get me to finish the book with some enjoyment. It's not enough to get me interested in the sequel, out next year. In fact, much as I admire her writing, and much as I approve of doing new things, I'm not sure I'm in Hand's audience any more.
In brief - if you're looking for a return to Hand's early work, look elsewhere. If you want gritty, dark, well written horror, this is the book for you, especially if you're excited about photography.
August 2, 2021
A veces hay libros, que aunque sabes que no son obras maestras, sin embargo a medida que los lees, sí que dan la diana en lo que se refiere a tus gustos personales, y este libro es uno de ellos. Generation Loss o Generación Perdida la traduciria yo, aunque esta novela no esté en castellano, reúne mucho de los requisitos que adoro: un ambiente inquietante y turbador, una buena historia y un personaje central sólido y con profundidad a la hora de avanzar en la novela y por supuesto bien escrito, sin tonterias de relleno.
Generation Loss es el primero de una serie cuyo personaje central es Cassandra Neary, conocida en ciertos circulos de culto como Cass Neary, una ex-fotógrafa que tuvo su momento en la escena punk del Nueva York de los 70 codeándose con los músicos de la época y porque escribió un libro de fotografia "Dead Girls", convertido en una obra de culto. Cuando empieza la novela, Cass es una mujer de mediana edad, rota y perdida, que abusa de las pastillas y del alcohol, y así y todo su voz narrativa es maravillosa, aguda, irónica y con una profunda sabiduria a la hora de mostrar su fortaleza. La novela empieza cuando Cass acepta un trabajo para ir a entrevistar a una isla perdida de Maine a Aphrodite Kamestos, una fotógrafa octogenaria, que vive recluida en la isla después de haber fundado una comuna hippie y cuyas fotografias se cotizan a un precio altisimo. Nadie ha sabido nada de ella desde hace décadas y Cass Neary que considera a Aphrodite su inspiración para convertirse en fotógrafa, acepta el trabajo. Pero en cuanto Cass llega al pueblo enseguida nota que hay algo raro, cerrado y claustrofóbico en el pueblo y sus islas cercanas, todo parece ir oscureciendose en su búsqueda de Aphrodite, y la desaparición de una adolescente, entorpece de alguna forma la misión que la la llevado hasta alli.
No sabría si encuadrarla en novela negra, porque aunque es cierto que Cass en cierta forma se involucra en la inquietante oscuridad que envuelve el pueblo y comienza a indagar, también es verdad que la autora no usa la típica plantilla a la que estamos acostumbrados en las novelas de suspense o thrillers. Desde el principio está clarisimo que es una novela sobre los problemas de comunicación que tiene su personaje principal, una mujer áspera y rota que carga con sus traumas, con su botella de Jack Daniel's y con su cámara, y se enfrenta a la vida como se presenta: imprevisiblemente. Es una novela que aborda muchos temas, es compleja y está clarisimo que no estamos acostumbrados a personajes como Cass Neary, una mujer que no encaja en ningún tópico, que lucha con sus fantasmas mientras encaja los embates y lo grotesco de la vida. ¡¡Y qué bien escribe Elizabeth Hand!!! Una pena que nadie en España la publique.
Generation Loss es el primero de una serie cuyo personaje central es Cassandra Neary, conocida en ciertos circulos de culto como Cass Neary, una ex-fotógrafa que tuvo su momento en la escena punk del Nueva York de los 70 codeándose con los músicos de la época y porque escribió un libro de fotografia "Dead Girls", convertido en una obra de culto. Cuando empieza la novela, Cass es una mujer de mediana edad, rota y perdida, que abusa de las pastillas y del alcohol, y así y todo su voz narrativa es maravillosa, aguda, irónica y con una profunda sabiduria a la hora de mostrar su fortaleza. La novela empieza cuando Cass acepta un trabajo para ir a entrevistar a una isla perdida de Maine a Aphrodite Kamestos, una fotógrafa octogenaria, que vive recluida en la isla después de haber fundado una comuna hippie y cuyas fotografias se cotizan a un precio altisimo. Nadie ha sabido nada de ella desde hace décadas y Cass Neary que considera a Aphrodite su inspiración para convertirse en fotógrafa, acepta el trabajo. Pero en cuanto Cass llega al pueblo enseguida nota que hay algo raro, cerrado y claustrofóbico en el pueblo y sus islas cercanas, todo parece ir oscureciendose en su búsqueda de Aphrodite, y la desaparición de una adolescente, entorpece de alguna forma la misión que la la llevado hasta alli.
No sabría si encuadrarla en novela negra, porque aunque es cierto que Cass en cierta forma se involucra en la inquietante oscuridad que envuelve el pueblo y comienza a indagar, también es verdad que la autora no usa la típica plantilla a la que estamos acostumbrados en las novelas de suspense o thrillers. Desde el principio está clarisimo que es una novela sobre los problemas de comunicación que tiene su personaje principal, una mujer áspera y rota que carga con sus traumas, con su botella de Jack Daniel's y con su cámara, y se enfrenta a la vida como se presenta: imprevisiblemente. Es una novela que aborda muchos temas, es compleja y está clarisimo que no estamos acostumbrados a personajes como Cass Neary, una mujer que no encaja en ningún tópico, que lucha con sus fantasmas mientras encaja los embates y lo grotesco de la vida. ¡¡Y qué bien escribe Elizabeth Hand!!! Una pena que nadie en España la publique.
December 4, 2008
I first started reading Elizabeth Hand's books in the mid 90's. I've always had a hard time exactly describing my response to her books. Her early works (the books I read in the mid 90's) were EXTREMELY dark post-apocalyptic science fiction. Beautifully written - I used to say that if other books were like cotton, her books were velvet. Maybe a better comparison is water and blood. Generation Loss is different. It's more or less a mystery, set in modern day, and not science fiction. I suspect, from the little I know about Elizabeth Hand, that it's semi autobiographical, or, probably more precisely, that the main character is based a little bit on Elizabeth herself.
The book is really about the dark side of art, how some artists see beauty in the grotesque, whether they want to or not. Elizabeth hand is a writer and Cass, the main character, is a photographer, but I suspect that the obsession and compulsion to capture the macabre is quite similar.
I probably would have enjoyed the book even more if I knew anything about the world of photography, but just knowing what I know about art was enough.
The book is really about the dark side of art, how some artists see beauty in the grotesque, whether they want to or not. Elizabeth hand is a writer and Cass, the main character, is a photographer, but I suspect that the obsession and compulsion to capture the macabre is quite similar.
I probably would have enjoyed the book even more if I knew anything about the world of photography, but just knowing what I know about art was enough.
September 21, 2019
Pretty good stuff. I like me some hard-bitten women protagonists who also kick ass.
September 22, 2022
Wow. This is the first book I’ve read by this author and I have to say I’m surprised and impressed by her craft. Still processing it. A thoroughly unlikable protagonist who is not static character, though I didn’t anticipate her dynamic potential at first. Redemption is one of my favorite tropes, and the way this author drags us through the foulest sensory experiences our gruesome humanity offers is both repulsive and cathartic.
So: yes, this is a story featuring an aging, punk photographer who is set in a kind of island mystery/horror—but the author weaves in a lot of poetry with the broken bits and creates a captivating mosaic. She makes good use of the abject and uncanny. Beautifully grotesque. Will definitely read more.
Thank you to Jennifer and Monica for the recommendation!!
File Under: Uniquely Grotesque & Exquisite
So: yes, this is a story featuring an aging, punk photographer who is set in a kind of island mystery/horror—but the author weaves in a lot of poetry with the broken bits and creates a captivating mosaic. She makes good use of the abject and uncanny. Beautifully grotesque. Will definitely read more.
Thank you to Jennifer and Monica for the recommendation!!
File Under: Uniquely Grotesque & Exquisite
June 10, 2021
The first entry in Elizabeth Hand's Cass Neary series is a bit rocky, but not because of the writing (which is excellent), but the lead character herself. On surface, Cass Neary is a hard character to like. She's morbidly fascinated with death, and uses that fascination to record, through her photography, the 1970s punk & drugs scene (with their attendant deaths and burnouts) in 1980s New York. That said, Cass has been a survivor from very early on, living through, as a young child, a car accident that would kill her mother. That event would mark Cass for life. So much so that she would have a weird, almost Lovecraftian eye-in-the-sky vision that would arguably suggest her future profession -- such as it would develop. But the punk scene, as time goes, was a flash in the pan. Neary's one claim to fame is a morbid collection of photographs that would attract some critical acclaim. Cass pretty much does nothing with that fame, and follows the downward arc of the punk scene. Scattered affairs, booze, drugs, and eventually, thirty years later, a low level job at The Strand bookstore.
At this point fortune or fate intervenes when an old acquaintance from the good-old-days calls offering Cass the opportunity to interview, for Mojo magazine, a very famous but also reclusive photographer living on an island off the coast of Maine. Cass doesn't exactly jump on the chance, but the subject is something of a hero and inspiration to Cass. She takes the job, and what unfolds is a foray into the quirkier areas and characters of coastal Maine. Some of the characters, rebels and outlaws in particular, have the kind of gritty depth that you might see in a Robert Stone novel. (That's high praise from me.) As Cass gets acquainted with the Maine coastal scene, she can't help but notice the recurring posters and fliers of missing teenagers. You know this is going somewhere dark. Really dark. And it certainly does, so much so that I thought about placing this one on my Horror shelf. Generation Loss did leave me wanting to read the rest of the Cass Neary series. Cass can be an asshole, a boozer, a druggie (basically whatever's available), even a disturbed voyeur, but she's also resilient, and something of a straight shooter. A Soul Survivor all the way. Highly recommended.
At this point fortune or fate intervenes when an old acquaintance from the good-old-days calls offering Cass the opportunity to interview, for Mojo magazine, a very famous but also reclusive photographer living on an island off the coast of Maine. Cass doesn't exactly jump on the chance, but the subject is something of a hero and inspiration to Cass. She takes the job, and what unfolds is a foray into the quirkier areas and characters of coastal Maine. Some of the characters, rebels and outlaws in particular, have the kind of gritty depth that you might see in a Robert Stone novel. (That's high praise from me.) As Cass gets acquainted with the Maine coastal scene, she can't help but notice the recurring posters and fliers of missing teenagers. You know this is going somewhere dark. Really dark. And it certainly does, so much so that I thought about placing this one on my Horror shelf. Generation Loss did leave me wanting to read the rest of the Cass Neary series. Cass can be an asshole, a boozer, a druggie (basically whatever's available), even a disturbed voyeur, but she's also resilient, and something of a straight shooter. A Soul Survivor all the way. Highly recommended.
December 31, 2011
A kind of redemption story, in the bleakest possible terms. Cass Neary (cf. Cassandra of Greek myth) is a washed-up ex-punk photographer who lives from bottle to bottle, stocking boxes in the back room of the Strand. She gets a call to go to a remote island in Maine, to interview a mysterious icon of photography, Aphrodite Kamestos, who's holed up there since the 1960s. Cass makes her self-destructive, stumbling way through the frozen wasteland of the "real" Maine, where the economy has tanked and people regularly wash up on the beaches, drowned and frozen. She gets no warm welcome from anyone she meets, and gradually starts to recognize a sinister pattern of missing people that none of the locals seem to see.
This is a book about seeing and witnessing, as well as about making decisions and acting. Palimpsests recur over and over, often in sinister terms: a horrible photograph scratched to reveal something else beneath, clouds spinning in the sky like an iris opening, the suggestion that the world we see is just a thin veil over something else that only reveals itself to the artist or the visionary. It's a tense, building read with a dramatic, satisfying conclusion. Cass is a complicated antihero, someone who does horrible things but who had my attention and sympathy regardless--and in the end, she's the only person who can do what needs to be done.
This is a book about seeing and witnessing, as well as about making decisions and acting. Palimpsests recur over and over, often in sinister terms: a horrible photograph scratched to reveal something else beneath, clouds spinning in the sky like an iris opening, the suggestion that the world we see is just a thin veil over something else that only reveals itself to the artist or the visionary. It's a tense, building read with a dramatic, satisfying conclusion. Cass is a complicated antihero, someone who does horrible things but who had my attention and sympathy regardless--and in the end, she's the only person who can do what needs to be done.
November 12, 2014
A short take:
I really liked Hand's beautiful prose. The story starts out tragic, gets weird, and then goes into some wicked places. Hand hits the right balance in her mix of psychoses and the artistic impulse. This book will stick with me for a long time.
More thoughts:
I was looking for a good horror read from a female writer (since it was very easy to locate and pile on work by male writers), and I found "Generation Loss" on a list of works recommended by Ann VanderMeer. I'm glad that I went with the rec, because this book is awesome.
I mention my take on Hand's prose above, and I repeat: the writing is gorgeous. I read a few passages aloud to my wife one night, and the language just flowed. Hell, I bet this reads really well aloud--something that other books cannot claim. Hand also creates an interesting and magnetic character in Cass, whose tendency towards sabotage demands viewing. It's tough to write a wounded character who doesn't come across as whiny or overly narcissistic, and Hand avoids both pitfalls with economy and grace.
Speaking of economy--this book is less than 300 pages long, and yet it filled me up with spooky atmosphere, gorgeous images and a taste of the crazies. I really enjoyed living with this book.
I really liked Hand's beautiful prose. The story starts out tragic, gets weird, and then goes into some wicked places. Hand hits the right balance in her mix of psychoses and the artistic impulse. This book will stick with me for a long time.
More thoughts:
I was looking for a good horror read from a female writer (since it was very easy to locate and pile on work by male writers), and I found "Generation Loss" on a list of works recommended by Ann VanderMeer. I'm glad that I went with the rec, because this book is awesome.
I mention my take on Hand's prose above, and I repeat: the writing is gorgeous. I read a few passages aloud to my wife one night, and the language just flowed. Hell, I bet this reads really well aloud--something that other books cannot claim. Hand also creates an interesting and magnetic character in Cass, whose tendency towards sabotage demands viewing. It's tough to write a wounded character who doesn't come across as whiny or overly narcissistic, and Hand avoids both pitfalls with economy and grace.
Speaking of economy--this book is less than 300 pages long, and yet it filled me up with spooky atmosphere, gorgeous images and a taste of the crazies. I really enjoyed living with this book.
August 14, 2018
Rarely have I encountered a narrator whom I have liked less, yet whose voice and company through a story has gripped me more. And Neary does somehow redeem herself by the end. The basics of the story seem to involve the paths of two brilliant photographers from different generations - the hippy 60s and the late 70s punk era - finally intersecting in the new millennium. Hand weaves together trauma, twisted idealism, drugs, art, chemicals, madness, love and death into a deeply strange, though not quite supernatural, tale. There is something of the manner of Kiernan's novels here, but the weirdness emerges from humanity rather than some numinous outer ether. Erudite and street smart, like its spiky protagonist, and I can certainly see why Hand would return to this world again. I read this in a single day, in 100 page stretches, it's that gripping and well written.
July 20, 2016
So I know that there are a lot of readers who can't connect with Cass Neary, and that's completely valid, but I think anyone who was a punk artist or ran with them and survived, can find something in her dangerously loose grip on survival in middle age really resonant. Now, take her out of her comfort zone and dump her on a rugged island where the hardscrabble residents seem pretty blasé about the high death and disappearance rate in their community, and this is THE atmospheric mystery I've been looking for this summer. I'm a third of the way through, and it reads like a Kathe Koja rewrite of Nancy Drew.
Finished--very creative solution to the mystery. Concluding action a little predictable, but who cares?
Finished--very creative solution to the mystery. Concluding action a little predictable, but who cares?
October 7, 2018
Great to encounter a writer at the absolute top of their game and in their groove. Elizabeth Hand feckin rips it up with her wounded, damaged ex-punk photographer anti-heroine who can see the damage in others but who still has a heart, even if she doesn't believe in it. Hired after decades in failure and obscurity to interview a reclusive photographer who lives on an island off the coast of Maine, she finds a damaged place full of damaged people and is soon drawn towards a web of old crimes and new: missing people, bloated bodies washed up with the tide.
The writing here is absolutely top of the line, the voice, the characters, the setting, the sinister development of the plot as its outlines become visible. Bleak and brutal and brilliant.
The writing here is absolutely top of the line, the voice, the characters, the setting, the sinister development of the plot as its outlines become visible. Bleak and brutal and brilliant.
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