Elizabeth Hand will be reading from Generation Loss: A Novel at Harvard Book Store on Wednesday, May 23, at 6:00 pm.

Novelist Elizabeth Hand has woven together art, music, and mystery in the story of photographer Cass Neary. Neary wanders through a fictionalized version of the New York punk underground, complete with cameos by Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, and she takes photographs of strung-out kids. Eventually, her collection, "Dead Girls," propels her into the limelight.

However, as was the case in the real-life punk scene, rebels and mainstream success don't always mix. Soon, Cass loses her fame and grows older in obscurity, but when she's sent to interview a reclusive photographer, strange events find her confronting a murderer and herself.

The excerpt of the first chapter, which is available at Small Beer Press, sold us with its still creepiness:

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.

Reviews have said that Hand creates the ultimate antihero. Few of us would sympathize with an addict with a penchant for dead and lifeless things, but readers can't turn away.

Image of Generation Loss from Small Beer Press.