Erica McKeen (Macy Mirka/Rooted Photo)

Like Italo Calvino’s groundbreaking novel If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler, Erica McKeen’s Cicada Summer (her second book, following on Tear, winner of the 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction) embraces boundary-collapsing literary techniques and multiple storylines, all while retaining a strong sense of character.

The conceit behind this narrative experimentation is an elegant one. Following her mother Colleen’s suicide at the start of the pandemic, Husha is invited to live with her grandfather Arthur at his lakeside cabin. She is joined by Nellie, her on-again, off-again lover. The awkward tension in the house is only broken up when Husha discovers a manuscript that her mother penned at an undetermined point in her life. The three unlikely roommates begin a nightly ritual of reading from the horror-inspired tome. Stories from the book overlap with events in the lives of its readers, and identifying the points of origin for such occurrences – whether the trio is somehow influencing the construction of the text or if the text is prophetically guiding the course of their lives – becomes a charming game of pin the tail on the errant plot point. 

As the three grow closer, Arthur discloses that the brother of one of his colleagues drowned as a child under tragic circumstances; not long after this revelation, Colleen’s book picks up the thread in a symmetrical rhyming story called “Swamp Woman,” which focuses on a woman whose sister and niece are inexplicably found dead in the middle of a lake. This imbricative feature of the book gestures toward every writer’s receptivity to the world and its influence, not to mention the mystical and fleeting source of inspiration.

In another tale – the stories from the manuscript are interspersed between the main narrative action at the cabin – a group of marine biologists encounters a rare breed of fish whose skin is completely covered in eyeballs. Following its dissection, the crew begin to grow supernumerary organs as well. In the strongest piece attributed to Colleen, a structuralist dissection of genre and childhood trauma called “In Transit,” parallels are drawn between a haunted house that is being transported and a young girl who has suffered an unspeakable sexual assault.  

While Colleen’s stories afford McKeen opportunities to showcase her talent as a stylist (one supremely capable of tonal variance and juggling multiple fields of action), it is her ability to write characters with affective resonance that makes Cicada Summer such a dramatic odyssey into the human condition. 

Arthur, Husha’s retired professor grandfather, initially balks at the prospect of having his daughter’s stories read aloud to him. Something about the entire pandemic exercise kicks up something hard-nosed and ornery inside of him. He rages at the book as if it were a studied campaign against his entire existence – as if it was designed to strip his life of all meaning.     

“Must I be witty and sharp … to be listened to?” the grieving academic questions after encountering a handful of Colleen’s stories. “Must I be self-reflective, recognize and expose my own shortcomings, my body’s malfunctions, as the woman in the story cheerfully examines her own hallucinations? Is there no room for authentic vulnerability, for admissions of terror or devastation?” 

“Most disturbingly … must I always be a metaphor for death? A reminder to the young that life is transient? Sickness personified—am I simply some literary device?” 

With its playful experimental structure and metafictional elements, one could be forgiven for mistaking Cicada Summer as the serpentiform work of an avant-gardist. The work remains grounded in pathos, however, and this unstilted pairing of sensibilities makes for a particularly fetching combination.