Cass Neary is a 48 year-old photographer who is as dead as one can be while still breathing. She lives in the same squalid dump that she had 30 years ago: a rent-controlled room in New York City where she still sleeps on a mattress set atop a piece of plywood on an old bathtub.

Thirty years ago, she cultivated such disorder as a wild junkie-photographer who shot uncompromising images of the then-new punk rock scene. She used to dance all night at CBGBs or Max's Kansas City. She took raw, shocking photographs of herself nude, posed in strange tableaux. Or dead kids who had overdosed. Then she parlayed these gritty images into one book deal and one art show: her fifteen minutes of fame. She's slid into obscurity ever since.

But what happened to freeze her into slow decay over the decades that followed? A lot of hard knocks, actually. But what haunts her still is her inability to have taken action in the past when it might have helped her. Perhaps this regret is what makes her listen to an untrustworthy acquaintance who offers her a job: go to the windswept coast of Maine to interview reclusive semi-legendary photographer Aphrodite Kamestos who remains an inspiration to Cass.

So Cass puts on her ancient black cowboy boots and black leather jacket and drives from New York City to Maine. It's November, and she enters a raw and hard-scrabble world that matches her state of mind. Trailers dot the landscape, housing the unemployed and resentful. Dead coyotes hang from beat-up sheds. Snow litters the ground like ash. Radio reception is spotty. Weathered flyers flap from utility poles, pleading for the return of missing teenagers.

Missing? Or maybe runaways of their own free will? Cass wonders as she gets a room at a freezing motel at the harbor town. The proprietor is snappish and self-righteous; his 15 year-old daughter Mackenzie is a sad little Goth girl who tries to steal a few moments from her chores to talk to Cass whom she finds fascinating. Cass, nervous to meet the great Kamestos, has no attention to spare for the kid. Her journey is not over yet: she has to get one of the eccentric locals to take her out in a boat to one of the barren little islands on which Kamestos has built her tumble-down house.

But when young Mackenzie vanishes under suspicious circumstances, many of the vengeful townsfolk will blame Cass: too many teenagers have already disappeared from this particular town, and they need a scapegoat. This pulls Cass into a decades-old tragedy that has its roots in a Dionysian commune once led by the imperious Kamestos. No one is who they seem, and Cass must draw upon resources she never knew she had if she is to survive and perhaps redeem herself.

This is a haunting novel filled with the weird imagery, vivid characters, and atmospheric suspense that I've come to associate with acclaimed fantasy writer Elizabeth Hand (author of the amazing Waking the Moon). Cass is a gritty and complex character (who often gets off some darkly funny lines). Photography buffs will love this book: unlike some authors who skim the surface of a profession, Hand grounds us in the fascinating details of this fine art – while never slowing down the action!

Generation Loss can be found on Amazon through this link: Generation Loss