[Influx Press; 2024]
Cass is a forty-eight-year-old bisexual ex-punk who peaked as a teenager and has spent the last few decades burning out in New York City. An apparently sympathetic friend throws her a bone in the form of a magazine gig, interviewing a once-famous photographer who dropped off the map. Cass, who needs the money, accepts and travels to the island in Maine where the photographer has been living a hermitic life. Once there, however, Cass finds her subject unwilling to talk and surrounded by unsolved disappearances and suspicious characters. This fall sees Influx Press’s re-release of Elizabeth Hand’s Generation Loss, the first of her occult crime series featuring Cassandra “Cass” Neary, a hard-living, steel-tipped cowboy boot wearing photographer and reluctant sleuth.
Unlike her anti-hero, Elizabeth Hand has had a long and productive career, writing in and in between the genres of horror and noir. Generation Loss won the very first Shirley Jackson award in 2007 and just last year, Hand published A Haunting on the Hill, her estate-authorized sequel to Jackson’s 1959 classic The Haunting of Hill House. Hand also had a story in When Things Get Dark, a 2021 Ellen Datlow–edited horror anthology of stories inspired by Jackson: “For Sale by Owner” followed a group of friends who break into an empty house to host an adult sleepover which goes from playful domestic dream to an eerie experience of phantom sounds and smells that affects one of the party much more strongly than the rest, in an arc that also broadly echoes Hill House.
Shirley Jackson’s characters are typically women who can’t realize their aspirations of femininity or who never developed them in the first place. These aspirations include: being a nurturing daughter and sister, living in a high cottage-core style home, having a fun and worldly partner who isn’t secretly pitying or laughing at you behind your back, and not being abused by your family or murdered by norms-policing townspeople. Jackson’s characters are social failures. It was true in 1959, it was true in 2007, and it is true in 2024 that a woman is considered upsetting when she can’t roll with the world. Hand’s Cass Neary distinguishes herself from Jackson’s tradition by intentionally refusing to aspire to a mainstream life and surviving anyway.
The first forty pages or so of the book serve as a resume of Cass Neary’s traumas and failings. This pacing is downright languorous by current standards, and will be either refreshing or a bit long depending on the reader’s feelings about our cold open era—practically every TV show episode, movie, and book bypasses lengthy exposition by beginning in the middle of a scene. Cass has survived many things: A horrible car accident that killed her mother when she was very young, a brutal rape on her twenty-third birthday, and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11 which killed her longtime partner. Each blow left Cass with bodily and emotional scars, as well as a stubborn inability to look away from horrible things.
As a teenager in the late seventies, Cass was briefly famous for photographing the burgeoning punk scene in New York. She staged a series of self-portraits in which she posed as dead women from famous paintings, leading to her first and only published photography book, Dead Girls. But Cass mistook her early success as a sign that society stood with her, ready to look squarely at death. She followed her passion too far for public standards and failed to interest her agent with her later work—much of which consisted of photographs of actually dead animals and people. Cass’s life dropped to a nadir and stayed there.
When Cass arrives in Maine to interview Aphrodite Kamestos, the book tips from the fictional memoir of a punk failure into noir-horror territory, with an underlying meditation on the relationship between art and darkness. Cass finds that Aphrodite is not expecting her, but still gamely hopes to get the photographer to open up, and drinks bottle after bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the process. Aphrodite is likewise too busy drinking herself to the edge of oblivion to answer any questions, and it leaves Cass with a lot of spare time to explore. During her visit, Cass encounters missing young people, a collection of animal head masks, and the human, psychic, and artistic remnants of a defunct “commune.” The pace quickens, the occult lurks, and the sense of doom is perfect, free floating, with a fuzzy causality. Cass stumbles on an abandoned, broken-down bus, once home to a commune member. In it she finds signs of lapsed occupation, as well as a disintegrating frog mask and books with cryptic annotations. All this points vaguely to something sinister, though it’s Hand’s sensory descriptions that evoke the pervading sense of decay and hopelessness: The bus had once been painted with bright colors that “time had turned splotched and sickly”; Cass finds “an india-print spread, chewed to a paisley filigree”; the sound of her camera’s shutter is “like a moth beating against glass.” It’s not just that Cass can’t look away from death—she sees death in everything.
In the midst of all that spikiness, there’s a comic gentleness to the way Hand allows Cass to survive massive quantities of trauma and alcohol. Hand herself once said in a 2010 interview, “As for writing about people who the world perceives as royal fuck-ups, I try to give them the happy endings, or at least happier endings, that evade them in real life. Maybe that’s wish fulfillment, or arrogance. Maybe I just relate better to flawed people because I’m one of them.” Maybe it is wish fulfillment, but it’s strangely charming to watch Cass kick her way to the center of the mystery after so steadfastly staying in her spiral, eking out an existence at rock bottom.
Like her classical namesake “Cassandra,” Cass has dark visions of the truth that nobody wants anything to do with. “I knew that I had an eye, a gift for seeing where the ripped edges of the world begin to peel away and something else shows through.” For a little while, in Cass’s estimation, the rest of the New York punks were right there with her, “grabbing at that frayed seam and just yanking to see what was behind it.” Then, suddenly, she was alone again. Punk died young, and the world moved on without it, without Cass. Relegated to the periphery, Cass lived as a specter of the lost punk lifestyle: “My few other friends lived lives less marginal than my own. I think they kept me around as an eidolon of the sort of bleak bohemianism they’d lost—still listening to the same old music, still going to work with a hangover, still sleeping in my ratty rent-controlled apartment on a piece of plywood with a foam mattress on top.” Generation Loss was first published around the time the concept of hauntology was being resurrected in online cultural criticism as a way of talking about the lost potential futures that haunt our present-day. Though Hand doesn’t use the term, Cass clearly self-identifies as hauntological, specifically the half-dead memory of American society’s desire to look directly at violent truths.
This hauntological bent is present, in a sense, even in title of the book, which refers to the phenomenon by which details of a thing—photograph, digital image, recording—are made ghostly through repeated copying. The deeply troubled genius photographers of Generation Loss (Aphrodite, and another artist who spends most of the book half-shrouded in open-secrecy), find that their work suffers when it’s mass printed. Their best work lives in limited edition runs of one, prints made with unusual and meticulous techniques, strange pigments. Any communication of their artistic vision into something widely available, meaning available for the future, necessarily incurs a loss in fidelity. It’s a loss they’re unwilling to abide, and that insistence both dooms and blesses their art with mortality.
Reading this book seventeen years after its original release is particularly interesting in this context. What does a ghost of the late 70s haunting 2007 look like when she appears to us again in 2024? Is she angry about our continued failure to pull at the seams of consensus reality? Is she sketchy and nostalgic, in her black Tony Lama boots? There are new violences on our minds today, new wars and new brutality, all with distinctly apocalyptic flavors. But the old ones are still there, too. They’ve never gone away. As Cass puts it, “It was a horrifying world, but it was a real one. How many of us can say we’ve made a new world out of the things that terrify and move us?” Very few, Cass would argue, and Hand seems to agree. Still, they’re both tough enough to keep trying.
Amelia Brown is a writer living in Boston. She holds an MFA from Bennington College.
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