Let’s get one thing straight up front.  Liz Hand is not playing around.  This is some dark shit.  How dark?  Dark net; 14 hours of dark a day; dark, dangerous men; available dark.  So dark that Cass Neary, a woman her creator describes as “your prototypical amoral speedfreak crankhead kleptomaniac murderous rage-filled alcoholic bisexual heavily tattooed American female photographer” is the brightest spot in the story.  Dark. 

People keep comparing this book to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, and I am here to just say no.  The Woman with the Jack Daniels and Focalin Addictions series is far, far superior.  Not only is Cass > Lisbeth by a hundred, Hand’s prose is  > Larsson’s (or his translator’s) by infinity.  Hand is not just a great storyteller, she’s an artist, and she brings this world alive in a way that rarely happens in “genre” fiction.  The unique combination of setting, characters, and plot will have you checking the internet after you finish the novel to see what’s real and what came out of Hand’s head.  You’ll find yourself wondering how she could possibly know about all this crazy shit, and how she can make up the fake stuff so convincingly.  I don’t know what to tell you.  She’s a genius, that’s all, and these works are wholly original and without comparison to anything else.

And thus begins my love letter to Cass Neary, the most intriguing and bad ass female anti-heroine to grace the pages of a novel since the incorrigible Moll Flanders.   Cass Neary is not afraid.  Of anything.  Much like fellow bad ass the honey badger, Cass Neary does not give a shit.  When Cass watches someone die, she doesn’t flip out and book thrice weekly sessions with her therapist to work through the trauma.  Cass takes a picture of that shit, and a really beautiful picture, at that.  Knock Cass unconscious and throw her into the middle-of-ice-desert-nowhere, Cass doesn’t wait for a hero to rescue her, and she certainly doesn’t die.  She staggers along, helped just a little by her BFF Jack and fave party girl Tina, until she stumbles onto a warm place to crash. 

In short, Cass Neary is not some sniveling tween, ‘fraidy-cat teen, or asocial twenty-something with daddy issues.  Cass is a grown ass woman, and she does not need your shit.  Unless your shit involves lots of Jack Daniels, amphetamines, art, and cash.  Like the honey badger bitten by a cobra, Cass may eventually go down, but sooner or later, she shakes that shit off and goes right back at it.  She may be flawed, but I’ll take her over a thinly disguised damsel in distress protagonist any ol’ time. 

That Cass has survived as long as she has is a miracle, and a major part of her charm.  Cass’s theme song is “My Way,” the Sid Vicious version.  Through no fault or credit of her own, she’s made it to middle-age, through punk rock, 1970s East Village, New York, a violent rape, and her own attempts to self destruct.  (And no, that’s not an error.  Not only is she an insanely bad ass female protagonist that will eat you alive and pick her teeth with your bones, Cass is also middle- aged.  Do you have any idea how incredible that is?!)  She is a talented lady, so much so that she has become a cult figure in the photography world, renown for her book Dead Girls and her impeccable eye.  Cass’s talent is the only thing that seems to frighten her.  She can’t seem to beat it into submission, drink it into oblivion, or speed it out of her body.  Her talent haunts her, and like any good neglected ghost, it keeps rearing its ugly head and dragging her into trouble.

In Available Dark, Cass has been asked to authenticate a series of photographs.  Of beautifully staged murders.  By a collector of murderabilia.  She’s whisked off to Iceland by this collector to meet with the equally creepy photographer of the series, both of whom are killed within 24 hours of her touching down.  Not long after, Cass finds herself up to her ass in whacked out Nordic Satanic cults, complete with Santa's evil sidekick (Satan Claus?), black metal, old lovers, and human sacrifice.

Did I mention ice?  Because there’s ice everywhere.  She’s in Ice-fucking-land, for fuck’s sake.  Hand’s rendering of the depressed city of Reykjavik and the completely alien terrain of its surrounding emptiness is a character all its own.  No matter how heavy things get, they are made heavier by the endless sea of ice and gloom.  You will feel the wind rubbing your skin raw, the ice biting into your digits.  Wrap up, and stay warm. 

And the old lover, fellow bad ass Quinn O’Boyle.  Can’t forget about him.  Cass certainly couldn’t.  It feels like we were only just getting to know Quinn when he had to split, but that’s ok, because before he bailed, he put Cass on the road to London, and the next novel.  I’m not sure how I feel about ol’ Quinn just yet – he seems a little tricksie to me, and as I’ve maintained before, boys just fuck everything up – but watching Cass go her version of girly over him is endlessly entertaining.  Still, I have a feeling that, not too far on the Cass Neary horizon, these two are going to meet in an epic battle royale.  They’re both hard core, no comprises, no-one-left-standing Alphas, and we all know that sort of thing never works out. 

I’m putting my money on Cass.  O’Boyle doesn’t stand a chance, and neither do you, fair reader.  If you’re coming to Available Dark a Cass Neary virgin, fine.  The story is complete in and of itself, but just go ahead and read Generation Loss.  Load up on Cass so you don’t get the DTs, because you will not be able to get enough of her.  She is addictive in the best way imaginable.  Once you’ve got both books in hand, put your cowboy boots on and hunker down for a tumble through a frozen hell on the back of a strung out modern day Valkyrie with nothing left to lose.  You won’t regret it for a second, and you might even reach Valhalla.  Just look out for Krampus and anyone pointing a camera your way.   

Lost Memory of Skin is one of the most interesting books I have read in a long time.  It’s an odd piece of fiction for me to read, in that it addresses a real, ongoing problem taking place in our world right now, told in a very realistic way.  As you can see from my other reviews, I tend to read stuff that is a little more metaphorical and fantastical.  Still, this one stuck with me, and I think it raises a lot of important questions that we, as a society, are not addressing, all while brilliantly pointing out why that might be.

The premise of the novel is based on a situation that evolved around convicted sex offenders living in Miami-Dade County.  According to local laws, anyone convicted of a “sex crime” could not live within 2500 feet of any schools, parks, bus stops, or other places where they might be tempted to commit more sex crimes.  This effectively left them with one place to live – beneath a structure called the Tuttle Causeway. 

Banks’ protagonist, the Kid, is living in a sex colony much like this with his pet iguana, the only creature he has ever felt any real affection for.  His “neighbors” include an elderly man who exposed himself to a woman in a park, a rapist, and a pedophile.

The Kid is an interesting character study of someone raised in today’s culture of parental neglect, easy, anonymous access to pornography of all ilks, failing educational institutions, the internet in general, and overt sexualization of young children.  The unwanted product of one of his mother’s many trysts, The Kid is left to raise himself.  Several times during his youth, signs of trouble emerge, but no one steps in to save him, not his mother, not his school, and not the U.S. military.  He is socially awkward, having never learned to communicate or bond with real human beings, and people respond to that in a predictable way:  he is bullied, exiled, then ignored.

The Kid meets a sociology professor who wants to prove that guys like him can’t help what they’ve become.  He wants to prove that, once even someone as broken as the Kid is given the proper tools to function in society, they will be able to do so.  It’s all about nurture to the professor, but he’s a piece of work himself.  Food is his addiction, and he uses it to keep everyone – his parents, his wife, his children – literally at arm’s length.  No one really knows the professor, and that includes the reader of Banks’ book. Rather than being marginalized by society for his slow mind and lack of social graces, he is marginalized because of his superior intelligence.  He is the shadow Kid, socially functional, to be sure, but just as emotionally disconnected from the world as the Kid could ever claim to be.

These two characters take us for a ride through the Kid’s world, through scenes that raise several important, and mostly unanswerable, questions.  Who is ultimately responsible for sex offenders?  The offenders themselves, for committing crimes that run the gamut from public indecency to child rape?  Parents, for neglecting to teach their kids about sex, its joys and its dangers?  The victims of the crimes, for presenting themselves as irresistible to the sexual predator?  Or society, for sexualizing everything from beer sales to toothpaste? 

Before the reader can form an answer to any of those questions, Banks throws another all important question into the mix.  What is real, and how much of a responsibility does the observer shoulder in determining the truth?  If there is more than one “truth,” whose is right?  Children present themselves as much older than they are over the internet; they are made to appear much older than they are in a creepy commercial shoot; the Kid is presented as a sympathetic, almost innocent boy, and then he prepares to meet a girl he knows is 14 years old by packing a triple X rated DVD, condoms, and lubricant in his backpack.  For a rather long stretch of the book, the reader is given evidence that makes him or her question just who the professor is and what his real motives actually are.  Then, that evidence, so carefully presented, is also called into question. 

Banks’ point is that each of us, in all circumstances, big or small, are given evidence, and we then make our decisions based on that evidence.  However, there is no way to ever truly know, 100%, if what we are seeing and believing is the truth.  We are at the mercy of our perceptions, no matter what we see.

My only beef with this story is that Banks comes off as a little too sympathetic toward the sex offenders.  While I appreciated his calling into question the circumstances that led to the creation of the sex offender colony and the idea that a man who shows his penis to someone should have the same punishment and classification as someone who buys seven year old girls for sexual purposes, I didn’t appreciate the suggestion that men who commit minor sex offenses are harmless.  Certainly, I felt for the Kid, for the abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother and the world, but he did, in fact, communicate with a 14 year old with the intent of having sex with her.  Banks seems to think that since the young girl’s father intervened, the whole thing should be written off as no harm, no foul.  Really? 

With all of the excellent questions Banks raises in this novel, he seems to avoid what, for me, might be the most important one -  what if her father had not intervened?  What about all the young girls who, outside the pages of this novel, aren’t saved?  There is a little undercurrent of victim blaming that put me off, or maybe victim shifting is a better way to put it.  The Kid is certainly a victim in his own right, but that doesn’t forgive his crime.  Or does it?  Hmmm, maybe I just hit on yet another question Banks means to raise.

In light of the prevalence of child rapes and murders that proliferate the media each week, The Lost Memory of Skin is a timely and disturbing read.  Banks stirs up a pot of questions in varying shades of gray, and the answers will depend on how each individual perceives the “evidence” presented by those asking the questions.  The perceptions, in turn, will be dependant on each individual’s background, intelligence, and emotions regarding what they’ve been shown.  We will each answer the questions Banks asked with what we consider the truth, and our answers will be very different, even though we all read the same words, just as Banks intended.

It really is a brilliantly crafted book.  Truly more than “just fiction,” it will likely open up an internal philosophical debate that might keep you up nights and force you through a varying range of emotions.  If you’re down for that, or find the juxtaposition of increased sexuality in a world more and more impersonal worth some thought, read this.  It’s not brain candy, but brain food.  And it’s up for the PEN/Faulkner, so you can pretend to be all intellectual and shit.  Enjoy.