Cass explains how the clarity and integrity of photos deteriorate with each generation of reproduction, while the original negative in turn deteriorates with time. This is called generation loss. Could she also be talking about the burnt out remnants of a 1970s commune on a remote island off the coast of Maine? Or is it related to ‘Blank Generation’ of the New York punk scene in the late 1970s, which is where Cassandra (Scary) Neary found her 15 minutes of fame?

Cass Neary comes from Kamensic, a town in upstate New York that readers of earlier Hand novels like Black Light may find familiar. In Black Light the residents of Kamensic had a penchant for Dionysian rituals. In this novel, Cass indulges in the more ordinary rituals of suburban wasted youth before taking off for NYC.

Cass’s early life is touched both by the extraordinary and by her own share of traumatic loss and damage. When she was four her mother had been killed in a car accident, impaled by the steering wheel. Cass was found unhurt on the back seat, surrounded by shattered glass. She is staring upwards, but what had she seen?

As she grows up, Cass is given to strange visions. When she is walking in a field at 14 she sees a great eye in the sky coalescing out of a counter-clockwise rotating mirror image of the landscape. She hears voices repeating her name.

The story is related in an engaging first-person narrative that achieves the difficult task of making the reader care for a character who repeatedly ‘blows it’. Cass abuses herself and her few remaining friends and lovers. Yet her unflinching honesty and exquisitely heightened perception of a dangerous and disturbing world keeps you turning pages and hoping the best for her.

Traumatised by a brutal rape, formerly famous Cass is going through the motions of life in a dead-end job in the stockroom of a large bookshop and a series of destructive relationships. An ex-lover contacts Cass out of the blue; then she is dead in the 11 September attacks. Cass suffers blinding headaches, stops taking pictures and plunges deeper into drunken despair. ‘I was forty-eight, and my life had been over for decades.’

Then an old friend offers her an assignment to interview Aphrodite Kemestos, a reclusive photographer living in Maine. Aphrodite’s work has been an inspiration to Cass. While she has misgivings about the assignment, she jumps at the chance to see the original photos and speak to their creator.

When she arrives Cass discovers that far from requesting this interview, Kamestos had no idea she was coming and has little to say to her. But Cass starts to develop an interest in some unsolved mysteries on the island, as well as in Aphrodite’s son. A look at the local newspaper reveals that local teenagers have been going missing for some years. Cass also discovers that Aphrodite had been part of a commune in the 1960s, and that people from this community remain on the island.

Here Hand shows another side of Maine. This is an area of economic decline and poverty, a ‘Vacationland’ that young people want to leave as soon as possible. At the beginning of her visit Cass meets a restless young woman, Mackenzie – ‘possibly the only resident of Burnt Harbor who has ever listened to Television’s Marquee Moon,’ who wants to be taken back to New York with Cass. But there is something more sinister at work than young people running away to the bright lights. When Mackenzie also disappears, Cass is jolted out of her self-absorption and forced to take action.

While utilising the form of a thriller, this book continues to exert its spell when many thrillers prove anti-climatic. After an intriguing beginning, the average thriller will have me shrug and say, ‘well, that’s it,’ when the big mystery is revealed. Then I forget about it. But the strength of the characterisation and the atmosphere carries this book into places where many other thrillers peter out and expire.

Elizabeth Hand is known as a writer of fantastic fiction, distinguished by its acute layering of gritty, mundane detail with moments of transcendence or horror. Nothing overtly supernatural happens in ‘Generation Loss’, but those who enjoyed her previous work will not be disappointed. Though Hand writes in a more ‘realistic’ mode, the real is continually transfigured with a strange light. As fitting in a novel about photography, perceptions of light and darkness are evoked with both passion and precision. For example, when Cass reminisces about the early punk years in New York: ‘There was a light in those days that fell on the streets in those days, a light like broken glass, so bright and jagged it made my eyes ache, my skin.’

Like her character, Hand has a gift for ‘seeing where the ripped edges of the world peel away and something else shows through.’

Rosanne Rabinowitz’s published fiction includes stories in The Third Alternative, Visionary Tongue and Roadworks, plus anthology contributions to The Slow Mirror: New Fiction by Jewish Writers, Deep Ten and Café Ole: Too Hot to Handle. Recently two stories and an interview were featured in Midnight Street 4. She has also written reviews and articles for TTA, Interzone and of course, www.laurahird.com. Rosanne lives in South London with a rather demanding 18-year-old cat (a big party was held to mark Weeble’s 18th). Sometimes she works as a freelance sub-editor; other forms of toil have included stints as a life model, oral history researcher, part-time mental health worker and full-time dole claimer. A graduate of the Sheffield Hallam MA in Writing, Rosanne has completed one novel and is working on a second. To read Rosanne’s story, ‘These Boots’ on the showcase section of this site, click here

© 2007 Laura Hird All rights reserved.