Erica McKeen uses horror and surrealism to examine complicated grief and the tensions of providing care
The Vancouver-based writer discussed her novel Cicada Summer on Bookends with Mattea Roach
There's nothing like a remote lakeside cabin to set the scene for a goosebumps-inducing story.
Add an unlikely trio, and a book of scary short stories that bleed into reality, and you've got Erica McKeen's terrifying novel Cicada Summer.
"Cicada Summer was definitely spooky. It was a bit scary. I was a bit frightened from the very moment that I opened the cover," said Mattea Roach on Bookends.
"But it also contained a lot of very real insights into grief, into caregiving issues that I, for better or for worse, have been having to contend with in my own life."
McKeen is a writer, teacher and librarian from London, Ont., currently living in Vancouver. Her first novel Tear won the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for literary fiction.
She joined Roach to dig into horror stories and how they reflect real experiences and shock us into feeling.
Mattea Roach: How did you come up with the idea for having stories embedded within the novel?
Erica McKeen: First and foremost, when I was thinking of creating this book, I had a group of short stories that were thematically linked that I wanted to put together, but it didn't feel like enough for me. That isn't to say that short story collections in and of themselves aren't enough in some way, but I think because the stories are so focused on the horrific, the delirious in many ways — I felt like I had more to say about them.
Because the stories are so focused on the horrific, the delirious in many ways, I felt like I had more to say about them.- Erica McKeen
That's when I started having the idea of putting a frame narrative around them: having these three characters, Husha, Nellie and Husha's grandfather Arthur, to actually read the stories along with us and provide some more context. They provide an opposite or opposing perspective of comfort, of healing — so we have something else going on there than just the horrible.
MR: Care is definitely a huge theme in this novel. There's this idea that care can be tied to love and connection, but it's also sometimes something that people do out of guilt or out of habit or out of expectation. Can you maybe talk more about how you've worked through that tension in this novel and possibly in your own life?
EM: While I was growing up, the versions of care that I saw around me were binary opposites. There was the more capitalistic care where someone's hired to do something and there's not a lot of emotional connection there and they're paid with money, so it's very much an exchange of labour for cash.
On the other hand, I saw this altruistic version of care which is often very gendered, as well. Many of the women in my life were giving themselves and caring for others, whether it was children or the elderly.
I'm also a teacher on the side. It's a profession with many women in it who are often working all these hours that they shouldn't be working to care for these younger people. I wanted to consolidate those two sides of the spectrum because both felt wrong to me.
This is why I repeat this phrase in the book that Nellie says: she doesn't believe in altruism. This idea that you can care for someone without some kind of benefit to you, I think is completely incorrect. Maybe it makes you feel better, maybe it makes you feel important, maybe it makes you feel powerful in some kind of way. So I thought, what if we could consolidate those two things? What if receiving money, for example, for caring for somebody didn't mean that you didn't actually care for them.
This was what was happening when I was taking care of my grandmother. We had an arrangement essentially where I would come over, I would help her cook dinner, we would chat together for a while, and then I would help her into bed, which was so special to me. But I would not have been able to do it if she also didn't give me a little bit of money because at the time I was working, I think it was at Pier One Imports, helping sell furniture as a salesperson.
So at the time, for me, this was kind of a consolidation or like a compromise of those two ends of the spectrum where I was able to kind of leave this job at the furniture store and come and care for my grandma in what I hoped was a really real way.
MR: Husha's mother has just died a couple months prior to the events of this novel. She overdosed on some sort of pill, but it's not totally clear whether that was an accident or whether it was on purpose. Nellie, who obviously is very close to her but isn't a family member, is asking Husha, "Tell me about your mom." And there's this way that Husha gets overwhelmed and all of a sudden feels like she can't remember anything. How do you think that grief and loss specifically alters the memory?
EM: To Husha, her mother has on the one hand died suddenly and on the other hand not at all because she speaks about how things like this have happened before — her mother obviously hasn't died multiple times in her life, but her mother has gone to the hospital for similar reasons before.
She almost has a sense of relief when she finally hears that her mother has passed because she's probably been worrying about it for a long time.
It takes a real effort to look things in the face.- Erica McKeen
But I think when hurt that huge occurs, there might be something inside of us that protects us from that feeling, that blocks it out of our minds. It takes a real effort to look things in the face. And by things I mean like the person you have lost and the feeling that you're experiencing.
MR: What about horror in particular is a genre that really captivates you as a writer?
EM: It really wakes me up. So when I feel that feeling of inadequateness, of limpness in my life, of finding no resolution, basically a feeling of numbness, horror is something that can wake me up again and feel alive.
I also love it because you can put monsters in it; monsters are just like forces of evil, of course, but they're forces of action. When you get those feelings of limpness, of malaise, depression, whatever it may be, like a monster is something that can force you upright in your chair.
But then also, I just love horror's ability to have these inconclusive endings. The horror trope, the classic thing is like, you get to the end of the story and the monster has been defeated or the demon has been eradicated, and then something happens to make you question all of that: a flash of red in the eyes, maybe the demon is still there. And that's very scary.
Once again, it wakes your body up. It makes you feel unsettled.
Horror is something that can wake me up again and feel alive.- Erica McKeen
But there's also an aspect of hopefulness to this, like the story can continue on beyond the page. It doesn't all have to be finished. Maybe that goes back to my experiences of grief and my dissatisfaction with the way that people are pulled from this life.
The story can go on. The world might be bigger than the one that we see in front of us. There could be something bubbling under the surface.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Liv Pasquarelli
