What they don’t tell you about your second book is that it will be just as hard to write as your first, or harder, because now there are expectations and hopes a little larger than before, and because now you’re older and in the way of things progressively more fatigued.
Actually, I shouldn’t undersell myself: I’ve been getting better at resting. That journey (which really is a journey, like the long and hardy walk home from Mount Doom, etc.) began with this novel, Cicada Summer. I like to say that the writing of this book was a wish for a different future. A sidestep away from what I seemed to be barreling toward at top speed. A softer life with rounder edges, time available to laugh and tell stories and grieve, full of un-possessive relationships and radical acceptance.
A bit idealistic, right? But only in the way that summer tends to be. And ideals, I think, give us something to measure our life against, like a toddler fumbling through a wooden shape puzzle. No this isn’t a triangle, it’s a square. Let’s find the one with sharp points, put it in its place.
Cicada Summer isn’t a short story collection, and it isn’t a novel—despite that inscription on the cover and its classification in the world of marketing. The book exists somewhere between genres, a blend, which I’m sure will lead to a lot of questions similar to those I received about my first novel’s homonym title, Tear. Is it this, or is it that? The uncomfortable answer is that the question itself is jammed and incorrect; the uncomfortable answer is that it’s possible to be two things at once.
Cicada Summer asks you to look with double vision. I wrote it, feeling cross eyed myself, from 2020 to 2021 when I was twenty-five and twenty-six years old. I am so immensely happy to announce that it’s available for preorder, coming June 18, 2024 from W. W. Norton & Co. Saying this might be cliché, but it’s exactly how I felt: I didn’t think the book would sell. But now I wonder if the stereotypical nature of that statement proves we should all be creating things we believe won’t fit snugly within a corporate world. Is it too bold to call it resistance? I don’t know—I just wrote something that felt and looked like a social system I would like to live inside.
Also, the book is a little funny. Also it’s a little sad. You can preorder here if you live in Canada, here if you live in the United States. You can also request your local library to order it—those last heroic strongholds (alongside our indies) of the book world!
About the Book:
A woman, her grandfather, and her lover quarantine in the remote lakeside wilderness—where their world splits apart at the seams.
In the summer of 2020, with a heat wave bearing down and a brood of periodical cicadas climbing into the trees, Husha mourns the recent death of her mother while quarantining with her ailing grandfather, Arthur, at his lakeside cabin in remote Ontario. They’re soon joined by Husha’s ex-lover, Nellie, who arrives without explanation to complete their trio.
Also among them is a strange book, discovered by Husha while cleaning out her mother’s house. When she, Arthur, and Nellie begin to read it together, they learn that her mother’s last missive was a short story collection, crawling with unsettling imagery and terrifying transformations. As the stories bleed into their cloistered life in the cabin, they must each reckon with loss, longing, and what it means to truly know another person. Incantatory and atmospheric, Cicada Summer is a dazzlingly original novel about how we grieve and care for one another.
Advance Praise:
“Cicada Summer is an ethereal and eerie novel that ingeniously explores how the full depths of both yearning and despair are not only lush and intricate but expanding.”
— Iain Reid, New York Times best-selling author of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Foe, and We Spread
“Mesmerizingly subtle and elegant, Cicada Summer investigates which stories must be told in order to unravel that which is unfathomable. As the cicadas chirp, their husks dropping from trees, Erica McKeen masterfully takes us into the liminal space of grief, into a world that crisps alive while it vanishes.”
— Gerardo Sámano Córdova, author of Monstrilio
With love,
E