Thunderstruck & Other Stories

Cover image courtesy and copyright The Dial Press 2014

Elizabeth McCracken's Thunderstruck & Other Stories (The Dial Press) is a collection of nine tales. She teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Her previous four books include two novels, a memoir, and a short story collection. The narratives in Thunderstruck brim over with loss and disaster, experienced by the characters in abrupt ways: missing people, kidnap, accidents, and stroke. "I tell myself," she says, "Your next book should try to be a little cheerier."

The earliest story in the collection is "Juliet," written in 1999 when Elizabeth was working as a librarian in Somerville, Massachusetts, based on a murder in the town. Three stories were originally part of a novel and recently revised: "Some Terpsichore," "Something Amazing," and "The Lost & Found Department of Greater Boston." "Hungry," "Peter Elroy," and "Thunderstruck" were written in the fall of 2012.

From the opening of the first story, "Something Amazing," introducing character Missy Goodby ("The ghost girl is based on a girl who died when I was in fifth grade," says Elizabeth. "Not her character, but her death was the biggest event in my elementary school."):

Just west of Boston, just north of the turnpike, the ghost of Missy Goodby sleeps curled up against the cyclone fence at the dead end of Winter Terrace, dressed in a pair of ectoplasmic dungarees. That thumping noise is Missy bopping a plastic Halloween pumpkin on one knee; that flash of light in the corner of a dark porch is the moon off the glasses she wore to correct her lazy eye. Late at night when you walk your dog and feel suddenly cold, and then unsure of yourself, and then loathed by the world, that's Missy Goodby, too, hissing as she had when she was alive and six years old, I hate you, you stink, you smell, you baby.

The neighborhood kids remember Missy. She bit when she was angry and pinched no matter what. They don't feel sorry for her ghost self. They remember the funeral they were forced to attend after she died, how her mother threw herself on the coffin, wailing, how they thought she was kidding and so laughed out loud and got shushed. The way the neighborhood kids tell the story, the coffin was lowered into the ground and Missy Goodby's grieving mother leapt down and then had to be yanked from the hole like a weed. Everyone always believes the better story eventually. Really, Joyce Goodby just thumped the coffin at the graveside service. Spanked it: two little spanks, nothing serious. She knew that pleading would never budge her daughter, not because she was dead but because she was stubborn. All her life, the more you pleaded with Missy, the more likely she was to do something to terrify you. Joyce Goodby spanked the coffin and walked away and listened for footsteps behind her. She walked all the way home, where she took off her shoes, black pumps with worn stones of gray along the toes. "Done with you," she told them. 

The soul is liquid, and slow to evaporate. The body's a bucket and liable to slosh. Grieving, haunted, heartbroken, obsessed: your friends will tell you to cheer up. What they really mean is dry up. But it isn't a matter of will. Only time and light will do the job.

Who wants to, anyhow?

Best kept in the dark and nurse the damp. Cover the mirrors, leave the radio switched off. Avoid the newspaper, the television, the whole outdoors, anywhere little girls congregate, though the world is manufacturing them hand over fist, though there are now, it seems, more little girls living in the world than any other variety of human being. Or middle-aged men whose pants don't fit, or infant boys, or young women with wide, sympathetic, fretful foreheads. Whatever you have lost there are more of, just not yours.

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Characters are quirky, the plots move in surprising and jarring directions, and the settings are diverse--France, Maine, Iowa, and Massachusetts. The stories, full of sorrow and coping, would be unsettling in themselves if it weren't for how funny and awry they can be and how remarkable the prose is, especially in description and evoking imagery. 

Humor is an essential component of Elizabeth's fiction and the narratives, while dark and grim, have jokes in them. "Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark," she explains. "With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it. Otherwise it's just a dark room, and what you're trying to write about will be invisible to your readers."