McCracken’s wicked, funny ‘Thunderstruck’ strikes a nerve
FICTION
‘Thunderstruck & Other Stories’
By Elizabeth McCracken
The Dial Press, $26, 240 pages
Springtime may be entirely the wrong season for curling up with Elizabeth McCracken’s latest.
“Thunderstruck & Other Stories,” her first collection in two decades, isn’t likely to warm many hammocks or brighten any beaches. These nine devious tales of apparitions, disappearances and various modern-day menaces would be better suited for chilly October nights. Like hyperactive trick-or-treaters, the stories flirt with macabre themes and shocking plot twists, yet resist schlocky Gothic clichés. And the author’s wicked, spot-on wit is an addictive treat. The trick? Her talent for sneaking poignancy into even the most haunted of houses.
“A dead person is lost property,” says the nameless narrator of “Juliet,” one of the book’s most gripping entries. “Still, you’ve been searching for what was taken.”
The story begins with a playful, if disturbing, anecdote about a small-town library’s anxious pet rabbit, Kaspar, who may or may not be suicidal. Told in the collective “we” voice of the librarians, the tone quickly shifts from farce to whodunit. We’re not surprised when the unlucky rabbit keels over, but aghast when a library regular gets stabbed — 96 times (!). Doubts about the accused killer and the staff’s outsized reaction to the horrific incident make this a mysterious, perhaps unsolvable riddle of grief and culpability.
Commentary about the aftermath of death and the temporary nature of ownership inform almost all the stories in “Thunderstruck.” In the opener, “Something Amazing,” the ghost of a pugnacious 6-year-old torments a working-class neighborhood. Or does it? For the bereaved mother, the haunting may be less supernatural and more an extreme reaction to trauma. The lost child — or, technically, her memory — has become an “allergen,” a phantom toxin “everywhere in the house, no matter how their mother scrubs and sweeps and burns and purges.”
Stony Badower, the cantankerous museum curator in “Property,” faces a different conundrum of mourning. After the sudden death of his wife, Stony tumbles head-first into a dingy Maine rental that would make “Hoarders” seem homey. McCracken brings the grimy setting to life in all its gag-inducing glory from the aroma of old cigarettes and Fabreze to a mattress platform that looks like “the sort of thing you’d store a kidnapped teenage girl underneath.” Coyly, the author sets up Stony for an unexpected epiphany about sentimentality and “the fossil record of his life.”
McCracken, who teaches creative writing at the University of Texas, Austin, first came to fame with her 1996 novel, “The Giant’s House,” a finalist for the National Book Award. A novel and a memoir followed.
Like short fiction virtuoso George Saunders, McCracken’s gift for sarcasm keeps the humor dark and razor-sharp. In “Some Terpsichore,” she describes a hotel as “the kind of place you might check in to to commit suicide.” Each story’s prose swims in ingenious, sticky images: streets that smell like “gunpowder and lemonade”; a town “the color of dirty fingernails”; Hummel figurines exposed as Hitler Youth in training.
On top of this feast of details, McCracken keeps the action lively with an enthusiastic cast of misfits, folks described as “flea-market people, put together out of odd parts.” A similar explanation might apply to her mystifying techniques with story architecture. While “Thunderstruck’s” morbid sensibilities bring to mind Shirley Jackson or Chuck Palahniuk, McCracken doesn’t share either writer’s strictness for story structure or narrative consistency. Frequent shifts in point of view and protagonist roulette add fullness to “Something Amazing” as well as the title story. In both, it’s easy to savor the flashes of omniscience that shed light on big-picture issues.
But in “The Lost & Found Department of Greater Boston,” the rapid transitions lead to confusion. A tattooed lunch lady goes missing, her son gets arrested for shoplifting and her cruel father is found dead in his bed. It’s absorbing stuff, but the zigzagging narrative maroons the reader with a nameless supermarket manager before arriving at an unconvincing conclusion. Plot troubles also mar “The House of Two Three-Legged Dogs.” The story finds a jinxed English expat and his parakeet-obsessed wife in an anxious bind: Their alcoholic son is planning to evict them from their run-down French farmhouse. Like a talky Mike Leigh film squeezed into a Monty Python segment, the piece yammers on without gaining traction.
In a recent essay, novelist Ann Patchett writes about her long friendship with McCracken, the only writer she allows to read her works in progress. “I love Elizabeth’s books,” she explains, “but the road she takes to get to them would kill me.”
Judging from “Thunderstruck,” it’s a curvy road indeed. The moody, brooding and beguiling storytelling roars to life via McCracken’s painstaking mastery of language — and her killer instinct for slaughtering reader expectations. Held together with marshmallow fluff, handcuffs and spit, these fractured fables refuse to sugar-coat disquieting truths. Nor do they get lost in their own darkness. To borrow a pitch-perfect phrase from the author, “Thunderstruck” resonates “like the voice of a beautiful toothache.”
