Published in 2007, this is by Elizabeth Hand, who also wrote the very evocative Wylding Hall.

My audio-version was brilliantly narrated by Carol Monda, who has an amazing voice.




Photo of the author from the Internet Archive copy

I wasn't sure at first, but was thoroughly converted by the end. (Note that the following discussion as to what brought about my change of heart contains spoilers by the bucketful...)

Our I-narrator is 40-something Cassandra Neary. She was a photographer, with an eye for the macabre, and she produced a volume of photos called Dead Girls. But her career peaked a long time ago, and she's been bumping along the bottom for a while, with bad memories of a violent incident, a dead-end job, and a string of addictions.

Then she's asked to go and interview Aphrodite Kamestos, whose book of photos -- published in the late 1950s, and entitled Deceptio Visus (The Illusion of Sight) -- inspired Neary on her own photographic journey. Kamestos lives on Paswegas Island, off the coast of Maine. She's none too happy to see Neary, and claims she knows nothing about any interview.

The narrative voice is casual and gritty (which Monda conveys superbly). And the mood becomes increasingly oppressive. First we have the closed-in atmosphere of the tiny township where Neary has to overnight before a boat will take her to the island. There are people with connections to Kamestos; there's news everywhere of people who have disappeared; there's hostility and surliness in the air somehow, and fear.

Then, when she reaches the island, the feeling of threat goes up a notch. The island is weird. The people are weird. And Kamestos is a spent force, who spends her days drinking, and combing the island with her three enormous dogs. There are stories of an old hippie commune that used to exist here, some of whose members had been into some very strange stuff. And Neary keeps coming across mysterious photographs, produced by means of an arcane technique, exuding a noxious smell, and somehow redolent of damage and death.


The lure of islands... Neary eventually grows to like the bleakness

Kamestos dies, after an encounter with Neary ends in a fight, during which she accidentally falls. Our narrator takes care to cover her tracks -- after snapping a few photos of the dying woman.

Yes, I know... Neary is far from likeable. She intrudes into other people's spaces. She pokes her camera into circumstances where it feels completely inappropriate. And she steals things. Drugs, photos, keys, pens. She's a kleptomaniac. And she's feisty, prickly to the point of pugnacity, and absolutely a law unto herself. You know she's a damaged soul, and yet you can't warm to her. Yet she exerts an undeniable fascination. And although everything is pretty grounded, there are just enough hints to suggest a kind of mythical -- prophetic, avenging -- role for this unlikely heroine.

The Kamestos death, just over half-way through the book, is the first big "event". Before reaching this point, despite being drawn in by the looming atmosphere, I was starting to have the feeling that things were building and building and building, and the weather really needed to break.

The second half, slightly shorter, picks up the pace. Increasingly, our attention has been focused on Denny Ahearn, a former member of the hippy community. He is not mentioned until a third of the way through the book, but his presence steadily grows. He was involved with Kamestos at one point, and then with Hannah Meadows, a young "hippie chick" who died in a tragic accident. That death is the point where he begins to move from being a little "woo-woo", as one character puts it, to being seriously out there... He lives on an even smaller island, and is said to never leave it. But he does, he does, and he leaves it with nefarious purposes.

In the final section, Neary ends up on this island-off-the-island. Partly, it's coincidence. She can't get a ride to the mainland except by passing this way. But it's also a compulsion. She has to see this man, who -- she now knows -- is the source of the extraordinary photos she has been seeing. She drugs her boatman (what did I say about her being out of control?), and trudges off through the woods to find Ahearn. Who, we are now not at all surprised to learn, is a psycho. Even before Neary arrives at the house, she has found human remains. (If I'd been in her shoes -- in her steel-tipped cowboy boots -- I would have split at this point, but book heroines are made of sterner stuff than I am.)



Ahearn's place is full of eyes, mirrors, and turtle shells: "The turtle is the bridge between worlds, earth and sky," he tells her. "They carry the dead on their backs. It's my totem animal."

He is an indisputably creepy guy, addled by grief, and poisoned by the mercury he uses in his photography. Neary picks up the darkest of vibes: "What I felt was so beyond damage it was like a new color, something so dark and terrible it left no room for sight or sound or taste."

He knows Neary's work. He admires it, telling her: "We have the eye... When I saw your pictures, that was when I knew... You and me, we carry the dead on our backs. We write on the dead. Thanatography -- we invented that."

Now this all sounds grotesque. Horror-movie stuff. And it is, it is. But so far, it somehow works. It works because we see Neary being drawn in by this awful man and his art, even while she realizes what manner of man he is. She knows that somehow he and she are on the same wavelength.

She cannot deny that Ahearn has produced some amazing photos, far outstripping Kamestos's: "These images were so murky and strange, so tied into Denny's own, incomprehensible mythology, that they defied any simple description. They didn't shout out DEAD BODY! They shouted BEAUTIFUL, and WEIRD."

Embedded in the distressed surfaces are bits of organic material (dubiously obtained presumably), and Neary just can't look away: "I shivered. Not because I was afraid. Because it was beautiful. And because I recognized it. It was like neurons firing inside my own skull, like something I'd dreamed in childhood... A trapdoor had opened in the world and I'd fallen through, onto a bridge built of bone and flayed skin and eyes, the wings of dragonflies and a snapping turtle's shell. I couldn't look away."

It's at this point that we begin to understand the epigraph, by Roland Barthes: "I then realized that there was a sort of link (or knot) between Photography, madness, and something whose name I did not know."

It's just past this point, unfortunately, that everything bursts into melodrama. Neary finds Kenzie, the girl who has gone missing from the mainland town closest to the islands. Tied up in a bathroom, she's still alive, but in a bad way. So, in short order, we have the rescuing of Kenzie; a pursuit across the island; a boat chase; and the blowing up of Denny's boat -- with the concurrent destruction of Denny -- by means of a flare gun fired to the fuel line.

Aaagh. What happened? I always get frustrated with this kind of conclusion. Chapter after chapter that is creepy and atmospheric and haunting, and then suddenly you're in an action movie... Surely a book of this genre can have an ending that is both subtle and satisfying?



That reservation aside, though, I had by now totally overcome my initial scepticism, and decided that this was thought-provoking enough to make it more than just the "crime novel" it advertises itself as.

The character of Neary has a lot to do with that. She's hardboiled, that's for sure. But her dark, damaged depths are intriguing. She knows herself, that's for sure. At one point, she comments: "Everything is random. That's what I used to believe. Nothing happens for a reason, nothing happens because we will it. I never believed in gods. I believe in Furies. I think there are beings, people, impelled by the power to do harm. Sometimes the impulse is momentary. Maybe in some instances it's eternal. And maybe that's the one thing in the universe that isn't random. When I was raped, I ran into one of those Furies. Over the years, I became one myself." Maybe she redeemed herself just a little bit by her rescue of Kenzie...

Her regard for the mad, homicidal Ahearn remains a mite disturbing -- but it illuminates that grey zone that we all have to deal with. After the ordeal, she says: "Denny Ahearn had created an entire world out there with his turtle shells and daguerreotypes, his mangled home religion and tormented attempts to reclaim something from the death of the girl he had loved all those years ago. 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? Aphrodite tried and failed. Monstrous as he was, Denny was the real thing. So was his work. He really had built a bridge between the worlds, even if no one had ever truly seen it, besides the two of us. Now it was up to me, to carry the memory of the dead on my back... Denny had striven to capture something horrifying and make it beautiful, beautiful and eternal. For him, Hannah Meadows had never really died. Or maybe it was that she had never stopped dying. In all the years since he'd found her drowned corpse by that quarry, he'd never been able to look away."

The other thing that sets this book apart is Hand's language. I'll quote Matthew Cheney: "[This is] the pitch-perfect voice of a post-punk punk singing to us from off the page. Generation Loss is piped full of music, and not just in the references to Patti Smith or the Ramones or all the other bands that soundtrack the memories and emotions of the narrator, but in the words themselves, the cadences that riff and reverberate between each clause, sentence, and paragraph. It could have been some hand-me-down hardboiled patois from Raymond Chandler's back pages, but instead it's less flashy and more subtle, offering artful shifts of rhythm and precise imagery that seldom strains for its effects."

***

Also interesting:

3. This part of Maine is doing it tough. This is a community that would be struggling, even without the presence of a serial killer, and there are frequent references to social decay. The lobster fishing is in trouble, likewise the clam fishing. The Grand Banks are fished out. The paper mills have closed. Telemarketing came like a godsend, and then went again, leaving everyone with credit-card debt. So "people from away", people who are much richer and more powerful, are not too popular.


Bodie, 2004. Hard times...

2. "Punk's ugly little glittering perfect moment had ended," says Neary. "And so had mine." Her punk background derives from Hand's own experience of the scene.

3. The title is evocative: "Generation loss -- that's what happens when you endlessly reproduce a photographic image. You lose authenticity, the quality deteriorates in each subsequent generation that's copied from the original negativ, and the original itself decays with time, so that every new image is a more degraded version of what you started with. Same thing with analog recordings. After endless reproduction, you end up with nothing but static and hiss." Later, Neary comments: "When you look at [a daguerreotype] head-on, even the darkest parts throw light back at you, so you get a reverse image. It's like a photographic negative and positive, all in one. But then you tilt a daguerreotype just right, and the shadows and light fall into place, and what you're looking at becomes a 3-D image. It's an effect impossible to reproduce in a book or print, or even with computer imaging technology: the purest example of generation loss I can think of. A daguerreotype portrait always seemed like the closest you could come to actually seeing someone who had died a century and a half ago."

All up, an interesting listen. It's the first in a series, and I will definitely be up for more.