Elizabeth Hand

Cass, a photographer who made a name for herself in the seventies, now finds herself adrift when someone sends her on a mercy gig where she stumbles across an old mystery that is still claiming victims.

A Novel

Generation Loss

Sarah Sammis

Elizabeth Hand writes the Books section of Fantasy & Science Fiction. When I started reading books from my wishlist, hers were my priority. Generation Loss was my second Elizabeth Hand book after Waking the Moon.

Cass Neary was a hot shit photographer in the 1970s, specializing in the New York City punk scene. Sex, drugs and punk music burned her out and by the 1990s her career has basically flatlined. Then a friend of a friend offers her a job to interview Aphrodite, another famous photographer from the 1970s, now turned recluse up in Maine.

Cass goes to Maine and the book morphs into a mystery with horror overtones. Aphrodite's recluse life on a sparsely populated island brings to light a sinister history involving the photographer and her neighbors.

Generation Loss reads like a mixture of H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, E. Annie Proulx with a smattering of Daniel Pinkwater (if he wrote horror instead of middle grade urban fantasy).

Janice Hopper

Superb writing, but with a protagonist that was almost impossible for me to like. I'm judgey like that sometimes. Cases Neary is a mess, in a way I have no experience with, and little patience for. But the images of her life are vivid and compelling. The climax is dark and chilling. 

And hey, she's a hero at the end. Sorta. Mostly. 

I might tackle another of the books in this series, when I've re overhead a little from this one.

Valentina Di Martino

The secrets of small-town life can be more deadly than fist fights and dead junkies . . . Cass Neary is not afraid of living on the edge. A photographer whose shots of New York's punk scene in the seventies earned her fame, caché, and a cultish kind of cool, Cass has spent much of her life in the dark, watching and waiting. But thirty years later she is alone, adrift and falling rapidly into oblivion. So when an old acquaintance asks her to interview a fellow photographer - a notorious recluse who lives on an island off the Maine coast - she accepts. There, she learns about a decades-old crime that is still claiming new victims - and comes to realise that her days of living dangerously are not over yet: amid this inhospitable hinterland, Cass comes to realise that her final shot might also be a shot at redemption. Patricia Highsmith meets Patti Smith in this mesmerizing literary thriller.

Generation Loss A Novel

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