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    Generation Loss: a novel
    Generation Loss: a novel
    Generation Loss: a novel
    Ebook353 pages5 hours

    Generation Loss: a novel

    By Elizabeth Hand

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    "Startling, unclassifiable. . . Full of mysteries — all originating in its characters’ troubled psyches — and full of terrors that can’t be explained."—New York Times

    Shirley Jackson Award winner.

    Praise for Elizabeth Hand’s previous novels:

    “Inhabits a world between reason and insanity—it’s a delightful waking dream.”—People

    “One of the most sheerly impressive, not to mention overwhelmingly beautiful books I have read in a long time.”—Peter Straub

    Cass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption.

    Elizabeth Hand grew up in New York State. In 1975 she moved to Washington, DC, to study playwriting at Catholic University. After seeing Patti Smith perform, Hand flunked out and became involved in the DC and New York City nascent punk scenes. From 1979 to 1986 she worked at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; she returned to university to study cultural anthropology, and received her BA in 1985. The author of seven previous novels and the recipient of a Maine Arts Commission and an NEA Fellowship, she is a regular contributor to The Washington Post Book World. Hand lives with her family on the Maine coast.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSmall Beer Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2008
    ISBN9781618730107
    Generation Loss: a novel
    Author

    Elizabeth Hand

    Elizabeth Hand is the author of sixteen multiple-award-winning novels and six collections of short fiction. She is a longtime reviewer for numerous publications, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her noir novels featuring punk photographer Cass Neary have been compared to the work of Patricia Highsmith and optioned for a TV series. Hand teaches at the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and, when not living under pandemic conditions, divides her time between the Maine coast and North London.

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    Reviews for Generation Loss

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    • 4/5
      The premise: Cassandra Neary got her fifteen minutes of fame in the seventies by photographing the burgeoning punk movement, the dark side of life, and the dead. She got art galleries and a book deal, and then shortly thereafter, her life went to hell. Thirty years later, she's a nothing, a nobody, an addict who cares for no one. But when she gets a chance to interview the photographer who was her inspiration, Cass takes the job, hoping to jump start her career. What she finds instead is a very small town with a decades-old mystery that's still going strong, and if she's not careful, she's going to get lost in it.My RatingBuy the Paperback: my general rule of hardcovers is that unless you're a DIE-HARD FAN of the author and/or one of those book collectors that must have first editions of everything you read and/or one of those readers who think that anything that isn't published in hardcover isn't worth your time, unless you're one of these types, you're better off getting a cheaper copy. In this case, I would've been perfectly happy spending the cash on the trade, but I took advantage of the first edition hardcover because my husband falls in group two and tends to fall in group three and he was there when I made the purchase. ANYWAY: it's a good read, especially if you let the idea of dark, magical realism fuel the tension of the prose, because it keeps you from really guessing what's going on and why, and it adds an extra element of mystery to everything that happens. The book never really SAYS there's something supernatural involved, and in truth, reading it as straight, realistic fiction (that's got a mystery) is probably more legit than my dark, magical realism reading. At any rate, the prose is solid, and Cass Neary is a character that makes you work hard to like her, but in the end, the voice pulled me through, as well as Cass's unique perspective on the world. I love how the art of photography is used to describe Cass's world, even when she isn't talking about her trade. The ending was a little unsatisfying for me, but I enjoy Hand's writing very much (in fact, I really like how the setting really permeates the prose) and will definitely look for more of her work, both past and future (after all, I still have to get my hands on Waking the Moon).Review style: I'll be honest, I finished this book last weekend and I'm still trying to figure out how to review the sucker. I don't feel I have much to talk about, so I'm going to revert to my usual stream-of-conscious reaction to the text that usually ends up in spoilers. The full, spoilered review as well as cover art commentary, may be found in my LJ. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome.REVIEW: Elizabeth Hand's GENERATION LOSSHappy Reading! :)
    • 4/5
      no likable characters but compelling as a train wreck
    • 4/5
      Cass Neary was once a young photographer on the burgeoning punk scene who made a name for herself with a ground-breaking book, but a couple of decades later, she's burnt out, damaged, and still working in the storeroom at the Strand bookstore. A friend gives her a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to interview her idol, Aphrodite Kamestos, who lives like a hermit on a remote island in Maine, and Cass takes it. When she gets there, she finds several people as damaged as she is, and she stumbles onto a mystery.This is a story with a strong, unusual voice and a memorable, compelling setting, which more than makes up for there not being a lot of actual story, at least not until last third or so. I liked Cass primarily because she is so hard to like, because she does seemingly odd things mainly just to screw with people, and because her narrative voice seems so genuine. She is a person I believe in, not quirky just to be quirky, but quirky because that's what humans are. Pairing her with the island setting--remote, isolated, difficult both to get to and to get away from--works to take Cass out of her long-time comfort zone and yet situate herself in a place that might feel like home. Toward the end, the story is permeated by a wonderful neo-gothic atmosphere. All of this does make up for the rather breathless (and somewhat unbelievable) wrap-up to the plot, which almost felt beside the point anyway.
    • 4/5
      Damage. Hand is good at depicting, and talking about, damaged people. The protagonist of this book is damaged enough that she'shard to root for sometimes. She needlessly makes trouble, sometimes really bad trouble, for herself and pretty much anyone she comes into contact with. She has inexplicable impulses. She can be hateful. But . . . but she's articulate and observant and fierce. Much of the action of the story is implausible. But . . . there's enough good here to just roll with it.
    • 5/5
      Weird, bleak, beautiful and strangely compelling, "Generation Loss" is much like the landscape it portraits. Equal parts thriller and travelogue, and with one of the more interesting protagonists I've come across in quite a while. The "mystery" bit kind of sneaks up on you in a way that's a bit unusual, but not unwelcome. The ending feels ever so slightly rushed because of this, but it is a minor issue. The visual theme, with a story of photography and perception; seeing and being seen, is clear but never overstated. It is also a very "visual" book in the sense that it masterfully and efficiently conveys the look and feel of the desolated north of Maine where it takes place. I have rarely come across a novel that gives me such a sense of "place" as "Generation Loss": the way it looks, the way it feels, how it gets inside of your head - it's all here.
    • 5/5
      I am a big Elizabeth Hand fan. I read all of her (non Star Wars) books in high school and college. It's been a few (10) years since I've read anything by her but when I saw that she had written this book I was eager to read it and to see if I still liked her writing style. This is a dark book, but at the same time it is a beautiful book and I really, really enjoyed it.Cass Neary made it big as a photographer in the 1970's. She was part of the punk scene and specialized in photographing the dead; people who overdosed or died of other causes. Almost thirty years later she is a has-been. Constantly strung out on drugs or drunk she just barely ekes out a living slumming it in New York City and working at a used bookstore. Then a buddy of hers gives her a call, he has a job for her...they requested her specifically. Suddenly Cass is trekking out to rural Maine to interview a photographer whose work inspired Cass to start doing photography. Only nothing is what it seems out in this isolated community and strange things are happening...cats ending up dead, humans going missing. Cass finds that this isolated region holds secrets darker than she ever imagined, and for Cass that is saying something.I loved this book. It is in keeping with her previous works, although there is less supernatural/fantasy element in this book and more mystery/thriller to it. This novel is a bit creepy, but very atmospheric. Hand has a way of describing settings that really makes them come alive...you can smell them and see them. She also has a way of making dark things beautiful. First and foremost this a dark book.The characters are interesting and full of depth. Cass herself is definitely not someone to idolize (she spends the majority of the book either strung out or drunk) but she has a sort of wondrous naivete about her that is endearing. You kind of understand why she does the things she does and Hand helps you to understand why Cass finds beauty in the destruction and darkness of the world. So despite her amoral character and stupid decisions, somehow you end up kind of liking Cass. The same can be said for the old photographer's son Gryffin; he is mysterious and dark yet somehow likable.This book also talks a lot about photography so that is interesting; it touches on rural living and fishing as well as tourism.It is, all in all, an excellent book. Hand's writing style continues to awe me. I am always impressed with how engaging her books are, how intelligent they sound, and how they pry into dark places and find beauty there. Her description is amazing, as is the raw way she depicts her characters. The plot was very well done and Hand creates an excellent mystery/thriller.There is a lot of drug use, swearing, and casual talk about sex; so this book is definitely meant for a more mature audience.Overall I enjoyed every single word of this book. I couldn't put it down and was sad when it was over. Next on my list to read by Hand is Mortal Love; which I own, it is the only Elizabeth Hand book I haven't read yet. I also saw that she is coming out with another book later this year; a children's book called Illyria. So I am eager to pick that up to read too.
    • 3/5
      Gothic mystery. Depressing book, well written if you do not mind that most of the story happens in the last 1/5th of the book.
    • 4/5
      The synopsis suggests Cass is trying for redemption, but that doesn't seem to be on Cass's mind. Lurid curiosity, desperation and maybe even a tiny bit of pride. Those are the things that propel Cass out of her pit of self-loathing and inanition. Besides her still-born career as a photographer, that's the first loss we see in this story, where Cass loses her fear to act and takes on this strange assignment. Other losses soon follow, some literal, some situational and some just ingrained into life itself. The title is a very apt one.Despite nothing much happening until quite near the end and Cass's innate unlikability I was mesmerized by her story. Cass is unthinkingly amoral. A snoop, a thief, a manipulator, an addict. None of those things is particularly attractive, but I liked her voice, her story and her honesty. At once Cass battles her way through life and also slips through it silently. She can be terribly self-effacing or in-your-face depending on what will serve her ends more effectively. She is not a whiner though. Too tough to die is her motto and she has it tattooed near some of the many scars that encircle her body. Through many an internal monologue, Cass explains her past and her failure as a photographer, but she doesn't assign blame to anyone except herself. She blew it. She knows it. Her work has value to her and she is genuinely baffled at why no one else values it. Death in all its forms is beautiful to Cass and that's ultimately why she is in awe of Denny's criminally artistic photographs. She knows her ugly side is her best side and she's living with it as best she can.Another loss to bear is one of disillusion. Part of the reason Cass takes this assignment is to be near a photographer she admired. One whose work influenced her own. Aphrodite Kamestos. Oh sure, she's got the books and has seen reproductions, but to view the original prints, up close - that would be mind-blowing. Because part of what makes an avant-garde photograph is its very physicality. Not just the paper, but the emulsion and all that might be embedded, scratched or burned into it. The smell, the texture..all of it is important to Cass and her ideas of what is authentic. When she finds that some of the photos she has held in her mind's eye have been gone from this earth for decades and that finally the photographer herself has given up in a sense of futility and inadequacy, Cass is disappointed beyond her ability to describe. When she eventually confronts exactly what and why Aphrodite stopped taking pictures she understands perfectly and lets go of her heroine willingly; almost ashamed to have admired her so much. Denny knew though. Denny could see. Just why he waited so long to show Cass isn't exactly clear and I'd have liked a more thoughtful ending than the rush of action and insanity we were given.Overall though I liked it well enough to go on to the follow-up featuring Cass Neary. Neither of us knows what she's looking for, but I think she will when she finds it.
    • 4/5
      Okay, so this was really good. Tons of atmosphere, a nice creepy suspense story. I've read several reviews that say the last third is a let-down, with everything falling into place a little too neatly, and I can see what they mean. The first two thirds are basically scene-setting, so the story arc gets a little rushed at the end. But the scene-setting is really the point of this book. Post-punk New York, disturbing isolation in backwoods Maine, photography's dance with sex and death... Hand is largely known as a fantasy novelist, and I wonder if this crime novel will please her established fans, but it's a solid piece of work by any standards. The text is largely dialogue and first person narrative, which tends to make the characters a bit two-dimensional, but in the context of this story that's not much of a criticism. [book: Generation Loss] is all about getting into someone's (rather uncomfortable) skin. It's not large enough to be Great, but it does what it sets out to do, and it does it well.
    • 4/5
      Cassandra Neary's a character a little too close for comfort for me. I'm not talking about the drinking and drug using, but the edge to her personality that's both her saving grace and the thing that does her in. An Erin Brockovich that went the wrong way. She's a washout, a failure (in her own eyes), someone who, for whatever reason, simply quit after the success of her one photography book in her youth. Thirty years later, she still doesn't feel good about her own work. Well, how could she if she spends all her time drinking and drugging and never picking up a camera? Yet I felt some real empathy because, though I don't drink much and I don't do drugs, I understand the resistance completely. A cautionary tale that ends with redemption.
    • 3/5
      I'm really not sure how I felt about this book. It had spectacular atmosphere, and Cass grew on me throughout the book, but she's just not a likeable person. I will probably read the sequel, so does that mean I liked it?
    • 5/5
      Generation Loss is impossible to put down, in the same way that it's impossible to refrain from poking a beached dead seal with a stick: repellent but compelling. Hand combines a bunch of unlikely elements - an aging meth head, a famous photographer, a serial killer, an artists' commune, a sullen teenager, and the lonely, tangled wilds of the Maine coast - into a lean and perfect tale about endurance and redemption. A beautiful and unsettling book.
    • 4/5
      Cass Neary is a burnt out has been, a brief bright star of punk rock photography. Tricked into a field trip to Maine's coastal islands, to interview an icon of her field, she trips her way into the dark dramas remaining from a long-ago hippie commune.The language is spare and lyrical, with descriptions of the coast and rocky islands with weather frigid enough to make me shiver. Cass is the coyote, the raven, the dark prankster, in search of a good time or at least some sense in a world that lacks all comfort. She is unwelcome, the outsider; and the catalyst for evil and good where dark secrets aren't discussed.I've said I'm not a fan of horror, and I'm not - but at its grimmest this story still maintained a gritty realism and a thread of hope. The mystery at the core of the story is handled so deftly that the book was almost over before I realized it *was* a mystery.I'll be looking for more of Ms. Hand's work.
    • 4/5
      I didn't realize this was going to be so gory. And, it makes Maine seem like such a spooky place, disconnected from the rest of the word--in a bad way. I wish the author had spelled out more of the Maine accent to make the characters a little more endearing. Still, it is a very thoughtful book about the art making process and how we evaluate oureselves.
    • 5/5
      A surprisingly good read. I expected to dislike the main character who is addicted to drugs and alcohol, but instead I found myself immersed in her world. Cass Neary is a has-been punk photographer sent to a remote island off the coast of Maine to interview another photographer. Strange things happen on Paswegas island - people disappear every few years. The story moves solidly and holds one's interest. A well-crafted novel.
    • 1/5
      My husband asked if I'd heard of Elizabeth Hand--apparently there'd been a lot of buzz about her books lately "on the blogs." Thank goodness I didn't buy this book--short, but not to the point. If one writes a thriller, shouldn't one try for a compelling plot early in the book, especially a short book? A character's anger and angst are plot points, perhaps, but do not count as actual plot. Alas. Has some surprise gory stuff, but whatever--I just didn't care.
    • 4/5
      This book kicked my ass. Not what I expected. A glorious mash up of Desperately Seeking Susan and Twin Peaks.
    • 5/5
      Oh wow, I loved this book. Cass Neary's voice is so compelling: damaged, perceptive, viewing the world with the vocabulary of a photographer. She's a difficult person, with her odd acts like hiding a stranger's keys or stealing photos, but Hand makes her utterly convincing, real and raw. Her fascination with death, her appreciation of Denny's photos certainly complicate her likeability. Nonetheless, she carried my interest right through to the end, and her final decision felt like a natural extension of her thoughts for the islands throughout the novel. "Happy ending" is too upbeat a phrase, but it's surprisingly optimistic. About the only criticisms I can make are the lack of surprise around the killer's identity and that she gets back the film from the turtle-shell too easily. Perhaps she deserves to be right, to have things go well, for once. Those issues did not detract much for me. The characters are all real (though only Denny and Aphrodite match Cass' odd layers), the setting evoked well, the voice absolutely perfect.
    • 3/5
      I found this novel engrossing, although it was also one of the bleakest books I have read for a long time. Cass Neary, the protagonist is not particularly endearing. Having left home as a teenager, Neary gravitated to New York City where she lived on the fringes of the burgeoning punk scene of the mid 1970s. Stumbling through a number of relationships, and subsiding into sustained substance abuse, she briefly established herself as a professional photographer, mounting exhibitions of her pictures of dead bodies.Thirty years later, still battling drug addiction, and drifting through life without any purpose beyond making it through the week, she finds herself commissioned to interview Aphrodite Kamestas, who had also been celebrated as a leading photographer back in the late 1950s, before becoming a recluse living on a sparsely populated island off the coast of Maine. Amazed to have been remembered herself, and desperate for the fee, Neary drives through the onset of winter to fulfil the commission, finding herself in a remote former commune. The locals all seem aloof, and she notices a plethora of handbills and notices seeking information about people who have gone missing, some of them dating back several years. Having arrived too late for the last boat to the island on which Kamestas lives, Neary repairs to a local motel. It transpires that that very night, the motel owner’s daughter also goes missing.Thus, Hand sets the scene for a stark crime novel, strewn with technical insights into professional photography, and littered with popular cultural references. Neary is pragmatic, but far from empathetic, though that does not impair the flow of the novel at all. The Maine landscape and climate loom heavily over the story, almost as characters in their own right. Hand maintains the tension adeptly. I just wish she had somehow relaxed the overpowering sense of bleakness occasionally. This was certainly a good, well-written book – I just can’t say that I enjoyed it!
    • 3/5
      Books where the protagonist does their best to fuck up their own life and the lives of everyone around them stress me out. The ending redeemed it a bit though.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      The sense of building dread provided enough suspense to keep me going despite the fact that this book has one of the least likable narrators I've come across. The Maine setting and focus on photography were also pluses. Anyone with substance abuse triggers should probably stay away... the main character is popping pills and drinking way too much throughout. I think we're supposed to see this as fallout from a personal trauma in her youth, but... she was doing all that before the trauma, too. Not sure if I want to check out the other books in this series or not. Maybe? She might have learned something by the end. It's hard to say.
    • 4/5
      There are generous people in the world and writers can be some of the more generous. Writers have opened up whole worlds for me to explore and without writers and their worlds, I probably would not have survived my childhood. I keep sort of harping on that when I write about books because I believe having reading skills gives you entree to so many thoughts, feelings, inspiration, and ways to think about the world, and to start thinking for yourself.I took Elizabeth Hand’s novel Generation Loss with me on my recent vacation (December '07) and finished it after I returned. It was not an easy read (you’ll see why below), much like Richard Beymer’s book Impostor was not an easy read (actually, a much harder read than Impostor), and oddly enough both in many ways about the photographer’s gaze and protagonists who struggle mightily, and both containing autobiographical elements.Elizabeth has a forum at Nightshade Books where she, again that word, generously, talks about her novels, her writing, even her life experiences, in a friendly and open way. I didn’t write a review of Generation Loss but I left her a short note with my impressions: I don’t know all the fancy words and meanings behind what writers do with their own prose style, but I believe this novel might be called “stripped bare.” I finished the book a few days ago and have had to let it sit awhile with me. Never have I read, at least that I can remember, a tale so grim and unrelenting in terms of a protagonist I sort of loathed, while at the same time, I rooted for. And every time Cass screwed up again or did something unethical or dishonest, that cycle of loathing and rooting for would repeat. Well, all art is a journey and this book took me someplace wild, weird and different. And touching.The imagery evoked is not lush like Waking the Moon, but it has its own elegant beauty within the harsh landscape of nature, and human being.This is why I read your work, Elizabeth. Because I love not only the places it takes me but how it makes me examine my own humanity.I high recommend anything Elizabeth Hand writes.
    • 4/5
      Say you’re a late 40s burnout, burdened by few ethics and no plans, with no lovers or friends, working a dead end job, fueled by drugs and petty theft.Your one great talent is sensing the damage in others and devouring its final results, with your ancient Konica camera, like a crow eating road kill. The results were the pictures in the suitably titled Dead Girls, the book the briefly made you famous decades ago.Then fate – or something just as sinister – gives you a chance to make some cash and meet an old idol, the reclusive photographer Aphrodite Kamestos.So Hand sends her hero, Cass Neary, in the early years of our new century, off to a Maine in the beginnings of winter and already beset by economic depression and the decidedly mixed benefits of being discovered by rich outsiders.Against a backdrop of meth heads and posters for missing people, she’ll meet the natives, the ones who still have some hopes of escape and the ones who have given up, and the transplants, mostly the remnants, like Aphrodite, of Oakwind, a failed 1970s commune.Cass’ voice is distinctive, nihilistic yet capriciously caring, a pilgrim seeking the beautiful in bleakness and death. She’s the acquaintance or relative you don’t mind hearing from on occasion – as long as you can view the chaos of their life from afar.And Cass goes, on that Maine coast and on its islands, from being a tagalong historian of death to its companion as she meets the very damaged survivors of Oakwind. The end may seem a trifle too hopeful, the resolution a bit, as Hand slyly notes, Thomas Harris-ish, but the trip is bracing as an arctic gust. Hand shows, in her descriptions of junk palaces, abandoned statuary, and various photographs, that she’s good enough to need way less than the proverbial 1,000 words to equal a picture. And who knew Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane could be used so well in a thriller?
    • 3/5
      Hrmmm, a post-punk protagonist with a heart darker than my own. A nice foray into some mid-february self-loathing. I constantly craved a shot, a cigarette, and the smell of the old 9:30 club while reading this novel. DC or NYC punk survivors will appreciate it and cringe.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Generation Loss - Elizabeth Hand

    9781618730107.jpg

    generation loss

    a novel

    Elizabeth Hand

    Small Beer Press

    Easthampton, MA

    This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

    Copyright © 2007 by Elizabeth Hand (elizabethhand.com). All rights reserved. First published in a hardcover edition in 2007. First Small Beer Press trade paper edition 2020.

    Note: An excerpt from this book appeared in 2005 in Gargoyle 50,

    edited by Lucinda Ebersole and Richard Peabody.

    Camera Lucida: Reflections On Photography by Roland Barthes, translation by Richard Howard, translation copyright 1981 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

    sister morphine from Babel by Patti Smith, copyright © 1978 by Patti Smith. Used by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

    Small Beer Press

    150 Pleasant St., # 306

    Easthampton, MA 01027

    info@smallbeerpress.com

    bookmoonbooks.com

    weightlessbooks.com

    smallbeerpress.com

    Distributed to the trade by Consortium.

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2020932655

    Paper edition printed on 30% Recycled Paper by Versa Press in East Peoria, IL.

    Cover © 2020 by Small Beer Press. Photo Be Thou My Vision by Crusty Da Klown (flickr.com/people/148598741@N02/).

    For David Streitfeld,

    who asked for a letter from Maine

    I then realized that there was a sort of link (or knot) between Photography, madness, and something whose name I did not know.

    —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (trans. by Richard Howard)

    ART NEEDS LIGHT

    look at the lack of it.

    —Patti Smith, sister morphine

    part one

    burning in

    1

    There’s always a moment where everything changes. A great photographer—someone like Diane Arbus, or me during that fraction of a second when I was great—she sees that moment coming, and presses the shutter release an instant before the change hits. If you don’t see it coming, if you blink or you’re drunk or just looking the other way—well, everything changes anyway, it’s not like things would have been different.

    But for the rest of your life you’re fucked, because you blew it. Maybe no one else knows it, but you do. In my case, it was no secret. Everyone knew I’d blown it. Some people can make do in a situation like that. Me, I’ve never been good at making do. My life, who could pretend there wasn’t a big fucking hole in it?

    I grew up about sixty miles north of the city in Kamensic Village, a haunted corner of the Hudson Valley where three counties meet in a stony congeries of ancient Dutch-built houses, farmland, old-growth forest, nouveau-riche mansions. My father was—is—the village magistrate. I was an only child, and a wild thing as the privileged children of that town were.

    I had from earliest childhood a sense that there was no skin between me and the world. I saw things that other people didn’t see. Hands that slipped through gaps in the air like falling leaves; a jagged outline like a branch but there was no branch and no tree. In bed at night I heard a voice repeating my name in a soft, insistent monotone. Cass. Cass. Cass. My father took me to a doctor, who said I’d grow out of it. I never did, really.

    My mother was much younger than my father, a beautiful Radcliffe girl he met on a blind date arranged by his cousin. She died when I was four. The car she was driving, our old red Rambler station wagon, went off the road and into the woods, slamming into a tree on the outskirts of town. It was an hour before someone noticed headlights shining through the trees and called the police. When they finally arrived, they found my mother impaled on the steering column. I was faceup on the backseat, surrounded by shattered glass but unhurt.

    I have no memory of the accident. The police officer told my father that I didn’t cry or speak, just stared at the car’s ceiling, and, as the officer carried me outside, the night sky. Nowadays there would have been a grief counselor, a child psychologist, drugs. My father’s Irish Catholic sensibility, while not religious, precluded any overt emotion; there was a wake, a funeral, a week of visiting relatives and phone calls. Then my father returned to work. A housekeeper, Rosie, was hired to tend me. My father wouldn’t speak of my mother unless asked, and, forty-odd years ago, one didn’t ask. Her presence remained in the framed black-and-white photos my father kept of her in his bedroom. While Rosie vacuumed or made lunch I would sit on his bed and slowly move my fingers across the glass covering the pictures, pretending the dust was face powder on my mother’s cheeks.

    I liked being alone. Once when I was fourteen, walking in the woods, I stepped from the trees into a field where the long grasses had been flattened by sleeping deer. I looked up into the sky and saw a mirror image of the grass, black and yellow-gray whorls making a slow clockwise rotation like a hurricane. As I stared the whorl began to move more quickly, drawing a darkness into its center until it resembled a vast striated eye that was all pupil, contracting upon itself yet never disappearing. I stared at it until a low buzzing began to sound in my ears. Then I ran.

    I didn’t stop until I reached my driveway. When I finally halted and looked back, the eye was still there, turning. I never mentioned it to anyone. No one else ever spoke of seeing it.

    My sense of detachment grew when I started high school, but as my grades were good and my other activities furtive, my father never worried much about what I did. Our relationship was friendly if distant. It was my Aunt Brigid who worried about me on the rare occasions she paid us a visit.

    Brigid was like my father, stocky and big boned and red haired. I resembled photos of my mother. Tall and angular, narrow hipped, my mother’s soft features honed to a knife-edge in my own. Pointed chin, uptilted nose, dirty-blond hair and mistrustful gray eyes. If I’d been a boy I might have been beautiful. Instead I learned early on that my appearance made people uneasy. There was nothing pretty about my androgyny. I was nearly six feet tall and vaguely threatening. I wore my hair long but otherwise made no concessions to fashion, no makeup, no lipstick. I wore my father’s white shirts over patched blue jeans or men’s trousers I bought at the Junior League Shop. I wouldn’t meet people’s eyes. I didn’t like people looking at me. It made me feel sick; it reminded me of that great eye above the empty field.

    She looks like a scarecrow, Dad, Brigid said once when I was sixteen. She and her husband were in Kamensic for a rare visit. I mean, look at her—

    I think she looks fine, my father said mildly. She’s just built like her mother was.

    She looks like a drug addict, Brigid snapped. She was sensitive about her weight. We see them out where we live.

    I pointed out to the bird feeder at the edge of our woods. What, like the chickadees? We see them too, I said, and retreated to my room.

    Several months later I had this dream. I was kneeling in the field where I’d seen the eye. A figure appeared in front of me: a man with green-flecked eyes, his smile mocking and oddly compassionate. As I stared up at him, he extended his hand until his finger touched the center of my forehead.

    There was a blinding flash. I fell on my face, terrified, woke in bed with my ears ringing. It was the morning of my

    seventeenth birthday. My father gave me a camera. I sat at the breakfast table, turned it in my hands, and remembered the dream. I saw my face distorted in the round glass of the lens, like a flaw; like an eye staring back at me.

    I took an introductory photography class in high school and was encouraged to take more.

    I never did. I quickly learned what I needed to know. I liked a slow lens. I liked grainy black-and-white film and never worked in color. I liked the detail work of creating my own photographic paper, of processing then developing the film myself in the school photo lab. I loved the way the paper felt, soft and wet in the trays, then the magical way it dried and turned into something else, smooth and rigid and shining, the images a mere byproduct of chemistry and timing.

    I didn’t care if the pictures were over- or underexposed, or even if they were in focus. I liked things that didn’t move: dead trees, stones. I liked dead things: the fingerless soft hand of a pheasant’s wing, mouse skulls disinterred from an owl pellet, a cicada’s thorax picked clean by tiny green beetles. I liked portraits of my friends when they were sleeping. I’ve always watched people sleep. When I occasionally babysat, I’d go into the children’s rooms after they were in bed and stand there, listening to their breathing, waiting until my eyes adjusted to the soft glow of nightlight or moonlight. I liked to watch them breathe.

    When I was seventeen I fell in love with a boy from a neighboring village. He was a year younger than me, fey, red haired, with sunken, poison green eyes: a musician and a junkie. I’d hitch to his town and sit on the library steps across the street from his big Victorian house and wait there for hours, hoping to see him but also wanting to absorb his world, clock the comings and goings of his younger siblings, parents, his golden retriever, his friends. I wanted to see the world he knew from inside his junkie’s skin, smell the lilacs that grew outside his window.

    One day his sister came out and said, My brother’s inside. He’s waiting for you to come over.

    I went. No one else was home. We crawled underneath the Steinway Grand in the living room, and I sucked him off. Afterward we sat together on the front porch while he smoked cigarettes. This pattern continued until I left high school. One night we broke into the village pharmacy and stole bottles of Tuinals and quaaludes before the alarm went off then ran laughing breathlessly back to his house, where he pretended to sleep while I hid in his closet. We weren’t caught, but I was too paranoid to ever try it again.

    I liked to watch him sleep; I liked to watch him nod out. I took pictures of him and got them processed over in Mount Kisco. At night in my room I’d look at those photographs—his eyes closed, cigarette burning in his hand—and masturbate. I told him I’d do anything for him. A few years later, he got caught burglarizing another drugstore up in Putnam County. His parents bailed him out and he wrote to me, desperate and lonely, while he was awaiting sentencing. I never wrote back. His family moved to the Midwest somewhere. I don’t know what happened to him.

    He was the only person I ever really cared about. I still have those photos somewhere.

    In 1975 I graduated from high school and started at NYU. I had vague plans of studying photojournalism. That all changed the night I went over to Kenny’s Castaways to hear the New York Dolls. The Dolls never showed, but someone else did, a skinny chick who screamed at the unruly audience in between chanting bursts of poetry while a tall, geeky guy flailed around with an electric guitar.

    After that I quit going to classes. I took up with a girl named Jeannie who waitressed at Max’s Kansas City. For a few months she supported me, and we lived in a horrible fourth-floor walkup on Hudson Street. The toilet hung over a hole in the floor; the clawfoot tub was in the kitchen. We put a sheet of plywood over the tub and on top of that a mattress we scrounged from the street. I didn’t tell my father I’d been suspended from NYU. I used the checks he sent to buy film and speed, black beauties, crystal meth. There was a light that fell on the streets in those days, a light like broken glass, so bright and jagged it made my eyes ache, my skin. I’d go down to see Jeannie when she got off work at Max’s and take pictures of the people hanging out back. Some of those people you’d still recognize today. Most you wouldn’t, though back then they were briefly famous, just as I was to be. Most of them are dead now.

    Some of them were dead then. I shot an entire roll of film of a kid who’d OD’d in the alley early one morning. No one wanted to call the ambulance—he was already dead, why bring the cops down? So I stood out there, shit-colored light filtering from the streetlamp, and photographed him in closeup. I was nervous about bringing the film to the place I usually went to. I had a friend at the university process the film there for me.

    This is sick stuff, Cass, he said when I went to pick it up. He handed me the manila envelope with my contact sheets and prints. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. You’re sick.

    I thought they were beautiful. Slow exposure and low light made the boy’s skin look like soft white paper, like newsprint before it’s inked. His head was slightly upturned, his eyes half-open, glazed. You couldn’t tell if he’d just woken up or if he was already dead. One hand was pressed upon his breast, fingers splayed. A series of black starbursts marred the crook of his bare arm; a white thread extended from his upper lip to the point of one exposed eyetooth. I titled the photo Psychopomp. I decided it was strong enough that I should start assembling a portfolio, and so I did, the pictures that would eventually become part of my book Dead Girls.

    People used to ask me what it was like to take those photographs.

    ‘How do you think it feels?’ I shot back at the guy from Interview. ‘How do you think it feels? And when do you think it stops?’

    He didn’t get it. No one does. I can smell damage; it radiates from some people like a pheromone. Those are the ones I photograph. I can tell where they’ve been, what’s destroyed them, even after they’re dead. It’s like sweat or semen or ash, and it’s not just a taste or scent. It shows up in pictures, if you know how to catch the light. It shows up in faces, the way you can tell what a sleeping person’s dreaming, if they’re happy or frightened or aroused. I don’t know why it draws me; maybe because I dream of leaving this body the way other people dream of flying. Not flying to a sunny beach or a hotel room, but true escape, leaving one body and entering another, like one of those wasps that lays its eggs inside a beetle so a wasp larva grows inside it, eating the beetle until the new wasp emerges.

    It sounds creepy, but I always liked the idea of disappearing then becoming something new. That of course was before I disappeared.

    But taking a picture feels like that sometimes. When I’m getting it right, it’s like I’m no longer standing there with my camera, with my eye behind the lens, looking at someone. It’s like it’s me lying there and I’m seeping into that other skin like rain into dry sand.

    Sometimes it happens with sex. Once I brought a sixteen-year-old boy back to the apartment. I’d picked him up at a club, dark eyes, curly dark hair, a crooked front tooth, tiny scabs on the inside of his arm where he’d been popping heroin, still too scared to mainline.

    The tooth is what got me. I’m still sorry I didn’t shoot him. He was beautiful, one of those Pasolini kids who absorbs light then shines it back into your eyes and blinds you. But I left my camera on the floor, and instead I just fucked him, more than once. Then I lay awake and watched him sleep. When he woke in the morning he looked at me, and I saw what had happened to him: his mother’s death, the small apartment in Queens where he lived with his father and sister, the after-school job at a pet shop. Cleaning fish tanks, measuring out birdseed. He told me all this, but I already knew; I could see the light leaking from his eyes. I wanted to photograph him, but suddenly I felt real panic. I gave him coffee and money for a cab and literally pushed him out of the door. The look he gave me then was crushed and confused, but that I could live with. What I couldn’t deal with was the knowledge that he was so close to dead already. The only thing that had made him feel alive was fucking me.

    I tried to explain this to Jeannie. She looked at me like I’d spit in her face.

    You’re crazy, Cass. You’re, like, a nihilist. You’re in love with annihilation.

    Yeah? So is that a bad thing?

    She didn’t think that was funny. She left me soon after and got a job at a massage parlor. I didn’t care. I stayed in the apartment. By then I’d gotten messed up with a rich girl from Sarah Lawrence who liked slumming with me. She split when the school year ended, by which time my father had figured out what was going on—that I’d been kicked out of school and was no doubt spending the checks he sent on drugs. He was surprisingly calm. He made sure I knew he wouldn’t give me another dollar until I straightened out and earned enough to put myself back through school, but he also let me know I was always welcome back home. I thanked him and kept in touch intermittently, usually by postcard.

    I bought a tripod and began doing a series of pictures, black-and-white photographs of me dressed and posed like women in famous paintings. I called the series Dead Girls. There was me as Ophelia, wearing a thrift-shop bridal gown and ribbons, floating in a tenement bathtub filled with black-streaked water—dye bled from the ribbons so that it looked as though blood flowed from my dress. There was me topless, sprawled in a Bowery alley on my back as Waterhouse’s dead St. Eulalia. For Munch’s The Next Day I lay on top of my plywood bed with empty wine bottles scattered around me. I used a similar setup for Walter Sickert’s The Camden Town Murder.

    It took me five months. I got a job at a wino’s liquor store on the Bowery to get by. There were twenty-three photos when I was done, enough for a show.

    My central image derived from a lithograph from Redon’s La Tentation de Saint-Antoine: a life-sized human skeleton, a plastic model I had a friend borrow for me from the NYU art department. I draped it with a white sheet and posed beside it, naked, my hand clutching its bony plastic fingers. I set the shutter so that the image was so underexposed as to be almost indiscernible, deliberately out of focus. All you saw was the skeleton, seeming to fall forward through the frame, and floating beside it a face suggestive of a skull: mine. I translated the drawing’s original caption into English.

    Death: I am the one who will make a serious woman of you; come, let us embrace.

    I added these to my portfolio, and a few portraits I’d done of Jeannie and her friends hanging out in the apartment and the back room at Max’s. The pictures were harsh and overlit, but they had a scary energy, most of it supplied by Jeannie herself in torn fishnets and smeared eye makeup, her works on the floor beside her, the glare of a naked hundred-watt bulb making Gillette blades glow like they were radioactive.

    It didn’t hurt that some of the figures lurking in the background were starting to get written about. Back in January I’d begun seeing flyers stapled to telephone poles around town: punk is coming. I bought the first copy of the magazine for fifty cents at Bleecker Bob’s not long after. A month later, the first copy of New York Rocker came out, and I bought that too. When I got off my night shift at the liquor store I’d walk over to CBGB’s and get trashed and dance. I’d take my camera and shoot whatever was going on, speed, smack, sex, broken teeth, broken bottles, zip knives. People laughing while blood ran down their face, or someone else’s. Some people didn’t like getting their picture taken while having sex or shooting up. I got good at throwing a punch then running. I started wearing these pointy-toed black cowboy boots that weren’t good for dancing, but I could kick the shit out of someone if he lunged for me and be gone before his knees hit the floor. I loved the rush of adrenaline and rage. It was as good as sex for me.

    Scary Neary! Jeannie shouted when she saw me coming. By then people were getting used to me. And other people were starting to take pictures too. Punk and New York Rocker didn’t create the scene, but they gave it a name, and we all knew where it lived.

    By now I’d made some contacts in the city’s photography scene. I brought my photos to the director of the Lumen Gallery, and he agreed to give me a small show in the back room. Three years earlier, Robert Mapplethorpe had begun to win a following among Warhol acolytes and some prescient artworld types. The same thing was happening now with the downtown scene. I sent out a hundred xeroxed invitations to everyone I vaguely knew and scattered another hundred at the clubs where I hung out. I made sure all the musicians knew they were featured in the photos. Then I bought myself a bottle of Taittinger Brut, got smashed, and went to my opening.

    It was the right place at the right time. Dead Girls bridged the gap between two camps, photography and punk, my staged self-portraits and documentary images of the downtown scene. The dreamy kitsch of photos like St. Eulalia melded into the shock of seeing Jeannie nod out while the lead singer of Anubis Uprising masturbated onto her face. I could hear the buzz as I stumbled into the back room at Lumen.

    I was a hit, and I wasn’t yet twenty years old.

    who are the mystery girls? ran the Voice headline a week after my show opened. cassandra neary’s punk provocations. They used a detail of St. Eulalia, cropped so you could see my bare foot and the Canal Street sign. It looked like a crime-scene photo. This wasn’t a bad take, since I was being castigated in the press for everything from pornography to drug dealing.

    I didn’t care. I was safe behind my camera at CBGB’s. I loved the rituals of processing film. I had an instinctive feel for it, how long it would take for an image to bleed from the neg onto emulsion paper. I loved playing with the negs, manipulating light and shadow and time until the world looked just right, until everything in front of me was just the way I wanted it to be.

    But best of all I loved being alone in the dark with the infrared bulb, that incandescent flare when I switched the lights back on and there it was: a black-and-white print: a body, an eye, a tongue, a cunt, a prick, a hand, a tree; drunk kids racing through a side street with their eyes white like they’d seen a ghost with a gun.

    This is what I lived for, me alone with these things. Not just knowing I’d seen them and taken the picture but feeling like I’d made them, like they’d never have existed without me. Nothing is like that: not sex, not drugs, not booze or sunrise off the most beautiful place you can imagine. Nothing is like knowing you can make something like that real. I felt like I was fucking God.

    You read a lot of crap about photographic craftsmanship in those days, and technique; but you didn’t hear shit about vision. 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. What that whole downtown scene was about, at least for a little while, was people grabbing at that frayed seam and just yanking to see what was behind it; to see what was left when everything else was torn away.

    My story was picked up by the Daily News. Then the Sunday Times Magazine interviewed me for a very brief piece. And there were the Dead Girls photos, and there was me, smoking a Kent and wearing beat-up black jeans and red Keds and a MC5 T-shirt filigreed with cigarette burns, my hair a dirty blond halo around a pale face with no makeup. I looked like what your mother dreams about in the middle of the night when you don’t come home.

    I was actually a little worried about what my father would think. He finally called me after the Times Magazine story ran. He made it clear that he had no interest in seeing the show—a relief to both of us—but he also wanted to make sure I wasn’t in any legal trouble.

    Anything comes up, call Ken Wilburn over in Queens, he said and gave me the number. He represents some guys, they’ll help you out if you get into trouble. I don’t know how the hell you can make money out of this stuff, Cass, but I hope to God you do. Especially if you need Wilburn.

    I never did need to call

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