Generation Loss

Veteran novelist Hand’s eighth work is the engaging story of Cass Neary, once a wunderkind of the photography/punk scene in New York, now 30 years past her prime and 15 minutes of fame. Deeply unhappy, or perhaps numb, she lives the exact same life she had when she was 20 (dead-end jobs, no real relationships, sex, drugs and occasional photographs).

She gets a freelance job that sends her to remote Paswegas Island to interview and photograph one of her heroes, Aphrodite Kamestos, a fellow photographer from the ’60s counterculture who influenced Cass’s work. There, Cass discovers the commune Aphrodite helped found has taken the ideas of her gritty, bleak vision to a place they were never meant to go. Cass becomes embroiled in nothing short of a horror-movie nightmare, and is forced to confront the darkness in her own work and life.

This novel disturbs like Cass’s photos of dead junkies and squalid club scenes. While in some ways she’s just another self-destructive person, Cass’s intelligence and talent make her an appealing mess. Hand propels this oddly appealing character through an old-fashioned mystery-thriller with stirring results. In the end, Generation Loss is a conventional story of sin and redemption. With darkly inventive polish, Hand reveals a character so deeply disordered, she’s both unlikable and compelling.—Beth Dugan