LOCUS REVIEW

Generation Loss review by Nick Gevers.

Elizabeth Hand, author of stylish, poetic, and myth-saturated literary fantasies, has written a thriller about a serial murderer, with only tangential supernatural elements: *Generation Loss*. Certainly, when Cassandra Neary begins telling her life story, one may expect it to develop into another of Hand's excellent analyses of artistic obsession married to ghostly influence: Cass's early years are studded with visions, premonitions, a sinister voice murmuring her name (Shepard's Sadie started that way, and look what happened to her!) But these episodes, swiftly narrated, are essentially aesthetic and psychological background, explaining Cass's preoccupation with death, her alienation from diurnal emotions, her preternatural understanding of image and atmosphere. Cass becomes a professional photographer in New York, and her destiny, however tied up with illusion and delusion, lies in the secular world, and in the thriller domain of Thomas Harris and his gory ilk. Still...

Cass originates in Kamensic, a village in New York State familiar from *Black Light* and other of Hand's fantastic works. Perhaps she carries thence some burden of transcendent enlightenment, informing (for example) her instinctive recognition of damage in others, a necessary prompt to get her camera ready to capture the essence and outcome of that quality. Possibly Hand, always subtle, has penned in *Generation Loss* a text subliminally supernatural. But that's speculative. The thriller outline is clear. Cass, a disciple of Diane Arbus and the punk movement, becomes briefly famous for her photos of the dead and dying, the injured, the afflicted. She publishes a well regarded book of these. But trends change, and she is relegated to obscurity, her craft in collapse, her subsistence dependent on work in a bookstore. She is promiscuous, drug-addled, emotionally stunted. For decades she lives an empty half-life, careless of her safety (she is raped in horrifying yet numbed circumstances) and with few friends or lasting lovers (one, to make things worse, dies on 9/11.) She is a Luddite in photographic terms, scorning the digital technologies her peers employ. But in the midst of this stagnation, she receives an intriguing offer.

The assignment is to visit and interview Aphrodite Kamestos, another famous but washed-up photographer living on Paswegas, a small island off the coast of Maine. Hesitant because the commission comes from a dubious source, Cass nonetheless drives up to Maine, meeting several interesting characters in and around the small community of Burnt Harbor before venturing on to Paswegas. Cass gradually becomes conscious of two disturbing facts: first, teenagers have a tendency to disappear in this depressed area of Maine, some as runaways, but others less easily explained; and second, Aphrodite stood once at the center of a Sixties bohemian commune, relicts of which are still around, aging, frustrated, and in one case murderous. If Cass is ever to come to terms with her own damaged and malicious self, ever resurrect her own photographic genius, she will have to solve and resolve these and associated perplexities. "Generation loss" assumes at least three crucial meanings—the fading or diminished quality of photos as they are reproduced over and over (time and declining integrity and definition, in Cass as in others); the loss of the younger generation of local inhabitants (matching Cass's own loss of self when young); and the decay of creative power in the aesthetes lingering from Aphrodite's commune (they were artists and poets too; will Cass share the dying of their fires?) Grappling with these tendencies and meanings, Cass in a sense murders someone herself, but her sin is as nothing compared with that of the serial killer at work nearby, a monster practicing bloody and arcane rites in attempted re-ignition of his own departing inspiration. Genre thriller expectations are abundantly sated, and yet Hand's complex themes are triumphantly catalyzed and elaborated thereby, making for that rare thing: a thriller that means something. This one means a lot…

So *Generation Loss* is a fine "associational" book: something of a departure for the author, but fully as elegant and significant as her overtly fantastic works. There is grave beauty here, and great thematic power.