18. Generation Loss

By Elizabeth Hand

I first heard of Elizabeth Hand when her strange fantasy novel Winterlong ended up in my youthful possession.  The cover looked cool.  But after a few chapters, it didn’t do much for me, so I shelved it for years.  Unfortunately, this book can no longer be found.

Don't know if Generaion Loss is Hand’s first foray into the crime genre.   On Goodreads, a well-known crime author listed GL as one of his/her fave crime novels, featuring a punk photographer cum amateur investigator. That really intrigued me.

Hardened yet vulnerable, Cass Neary stumbles and mumbles her way through the story, pocketing other people’s meds along the way, never failing to keep a bottle of Jack Daniels hidden in the her worn leather jacket.  She constantly steals, sometimes for no reason other than to temporarily fuck up someone else.  What’s not to like? 

Generation Loss was also the first winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for outstanding achievement in psychological suspense, horror and the dark fantastic.  Not surprised. The opening paragraph even references Diane Arbus. I'm so in.

I thought that Generation Loss shared many similarities with The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, which was published posthumously in 2005.  Generation Loss came out in 2007.  No idea if Hand had read Stig Larsson’s international bestseller, but the plot seems stamped from the exact same template.

[SPOILERS] 

Cassandra Neary is a has-been photographer; Mikael Blomkvist a disgraced journalist.  Cass is a big-time fuck up; Mikael fucked up big time. 

Cass does not have a side kick, but like Lisbeth, she is a rape survivor and the damage inflicted from that continues to haunt her and define some of her actions.

Decades later, burnt-out and broke, Cass gets a gig interviewing a reclusive retired legendary photographer, and a former idol of hers; Mikael is offered an opportunity to write a book for a former captain of industry and interviews his aging reclusive relatives.  The interviewees in both novels are extremely unpleasant. 

There is a missing girl involved in both novels that prompts the ‘investigation’. 

Both protagonists journey to a remote village in the middle of nowhere during the cold winter. 

They meet various characters and gradually get drawn into the town gossip and its sordid histories. 

Both protagonists get drawn into the lair of the killer, which is located in an even more remote part of that remote area. 

The killer is lucid but utterly off his rocker, and both have a victim held hostage when they are discovered. 

The differences: 

Cass is a washed out, damaged piece of work, always looking for a way to escape sobriety;  Mikael is none of those things.

Meditations on photography and art – a key factor that elevates Generation Loss and one of the reasons why it’s a cult novel. It name drops many outsider artists and figures from the legendary NYC punk scene. 

Dennis Ahearn's insanity was caused by mercury & cyanide poisoning from the photochemicals used to process his bizarre daguerrotypes and elaborate rituals; Martin Vanger’s derangement stemmed from his psychopathic father and when he came into his own as a serial killer, he did away with his dad’s elaborate symbolic rituals. 

Themes and things that I liked in the novel:  

That photographers have a way of seeing things that ordinary people don’t.  Cass Neary was once full of unrealized and raw potential with “remarkable if totally useless” gifts.  

     And, just as I knew the first photo was by Aphrodite, I knew this one had been taken by a man. Phil used to make fun of me for claiming I could identify a photographer, no matter how obscure, by his or her image. He ranked on me even worse when I once drunkenly announced I could identify the gender of a bunch of unknowns whose pictures hung at a small gallery in DUMBO.

      But I did it. I nailed every single one.

     “That’s amazing, Cass,” Phil said. “Another remarkable if totally useless skill.”

     Even now, I couln’i tell you how it works. It’s like me picking up damage, like there’s a smell there, or a subliminal taste. And you’d thank that would be an easy call to make with this picture, because it sure looked like it would taste like cheesecake.

[I personally like to think I have remarkable if totally useless skills.  Take the Auto Motion setting in flat screen televisions, for instance.  I was at a friend’s house watching TV and I could immediately tell that Auto Motion was on.  I tried to show her the difference between having that setting off and on, but try as she might, she couldn’t tell the difference at all.  The difference I saw was like day and night.  An older memory was my high school photography class, back when we had darkrooms and shot on black and white film. We had a test where our teaacher would show slides of well-known works from the canonized photographers.  I was able to nail all one hundred of them and correctly identify the Atgets, Cartier-Bressons, Langes, and Franks.  Suffice to say, Mr. Booker was impressed.] 

This novel also reminded me of another book I recently read, the vastly inferior Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes. This is mostly due to the mad artist-serial killers who would murder then incorporate dead bodies into their art.  Generation Loss would have made a good antidote to the unsatisfying and mediocre Broken Monsters.  

However, patience is also needed for Generation Loss as it’s a slow burn all the way to the climactic ending.  The bulk of it is psychological and character-driven with a gradual build up.   And if you don’t like the protagonist, you’re done for – because the reader will get submerged, if not drowned, in Cass’s internal fucked up psyche. 

All in all this was a great book to end the year with.  It may be flawed, but it's flawed in a great way.

I was also pleased that Olman found the original hardback for Xmas, from Dark Carnival, I believe.