This has all the things I love to write about.  A book that might have slipped under your radar, put out by a small (beer) press, written by one of my favorite authors, and is very good.  I grabbed it off of my to-be-read pile after reading Ms. Hand and Lucius Shepard talking about the main character in the comments of a blog post and it reminded me that I needed to read it.

Mind you, this is not an unbiased review.  I try to be as unbiased as possible most of the time.  But there are always those authors you love.  Authors you found at just the right time and in just the right way to influence you.  Elizabeth Hand is one of those authors for me.  I had just entered college when I found Waking the Moon, a book about a young woman just entering college.  I had been reading tons of high fantasy and science fiction and all sorts of mythology and fairy tales, but I hadn’t come across anything that mixed real life with the magical world before.  Urban fantasy.  Mythic fiction.  Whatever you want to call it, I’d seen things like it in kids books, but never for an adult.  It blew my mind.  And she keeps getting better, with books winning awards and making the New York Times Notable Book List and all that good stuff.  Usually when my literary loving friends begin trashing all books that contain fantastic elements, I give them Elizabeth Hand.

Generation Loss, more thriller with ritual elements than fantasy, follows Cass Neary, a stockroom employee in a rare book store who had once been semi-famous in the 70s for taking dark and strange pictures in and around the punk scene in New York City, just as that scene was getting big.  She’s a dark character.  A flawed character.  I once had a writing teacher tell me the most boring books were the ones surrounding a self-involved flawed character who spends most of the book doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons and then at the end has an epiphany and redeems himself.  Ms. Hand doesn’t make this mistake with Cass Neary.  Cass is a wreck of a human being, but she is written with such sympathy and self awareness that you wind up caring about her and hoping she can escape this dark world she is in, even if it is just enough to connect with someone else for a bit.

Cass Neary’s friend Phil offers her a freelance job with a magazine interviewing the once famous and reclusive photographer Aphrodite Kamestos at her home in rural Maine.  He tells her Aphrodite asked specifically for Cass and that she knows Cass is coming.  It turns out getting to Aphrodite’s island is harder than it looks and Aphrodite had no idea Cass was coming.  And she doesn’t want her either.  On top of that, a local girl disappears just after Cass shows up and some of the small town folk think she was probably behind it.  Telling much more would only rob you.  It is dark and beautiful, energizing and draining in turns, and adds to my reasons for picking up every Elizabeth Hand book (okay, I skip the film adaptations and media tie-ins, which might be good but I tend not to want to read the book of the movie I’ve seen) that comes out.  If you haven’t discovered her, Generation Loss is a good place to start.