Tear

WINNER OF THE 2023 KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE FOR LITERARY FICTIONA GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 202249TH STREET EDITOR'S PICK FOR SEPTEMBER 2022A reclamation of female rage and a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman.Frances is quiet and reclusive, so much so that her upstairs roommates sometimes forget she exists. Isolated in the basement, and on the brink of graduating from university, Frances herself starts to question the realities of her own existence. She can’t remember there being a lock on the door at the top of the basement stairs—and yet, when she turns the knob, the door won’t open. She can’t tell the difference between her childhood memories, which bloom like flowers in the dark basement, and her dreams. Worse still, she can’t ignore the very real tapping sound now coming—insistently, violently—threatening to break through her bedroom wall.With the thematic considerations of Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson’s work, and in the style of Herta Müller and Daisy Johnson, Tear is both a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman and a bristling reclamation of female rage. Blurring the real and the imagined, this lyric debut novel unflinchingly engages with contemporary feminist issues and explores the detrimental effects of false narratives, gaslighting, and manipulation on young women.

Judge's citation, Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize"Tear is a deeply claustrophobic novel, concerned with what is real and what is imagined, and how being confined between the two is genuine torture. It is about the fears that come from within and the monsters we manifest as a result, forces that eventually destroy us

"Tear is a bold, unflinching bildungsroman that moves, chimera-like, between the real and the imagined; among the confusions and traumas of youth; from the humane to the monstrous. And therein author Erica McKeen accomplishes the truly remarkable. While walking in the steps of such gothic icons as Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson, McKeen manages to forge her own path: avoiding the clichéd, the gratuitous, and the overwritten to create in Tear an inventive, affecting, modern work. With assured control of her craft and respect for both her readers and her genre forebearers, McKeen writes with an originality, sophistication, and expertise well beyond her years."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The house has a dark grey shingled roof. It looks black in full summer sunlight. It’s rough on fingertips, on kneecaps, if you climb onto it from the hedges that line the backyard, which you can do, which a grown person can manage if she stays close to the trunk of the hedge growth. The branches are thin and bendy. They tear off, soft like a green tongue on the inside. Watch the eavestrough, it’s already leaning off the edge of the roof, catching more leaves than rain. It’s already rusting—it rattles in the wind.Down below is the front face of the house. It’s made of grey and white bricks. A concrete porch with wrought-iron railings juts out in front of the front door. A concrete path extends from the porch and joins with the concrete driveway. One large window cuts through the brick, the living room window.If you look closely you can see the smudgy outline of a face in the window. It blends with the reflection of trees, the road. The face looks blue in the mixture of sky and skin in the glass. Sometimes it looks grey.Lean closer. Here’s the cheekbone, the eyebrow, the long bend of lips.This is Frances. Frances James. Her eyes are slanted, minutely too far apart. Her hair is frizzed, almost curly, as if run through with static. She has freckles on her nose. In her lap are a bundle of fingers, clustered up, perhaps too tightly, the knuckles bent, the knuckles white. She watches out the window. It’s morning and cold outside, so cold she can feel it through the glass. She watches the children as they walk to school.These children rake up a memory: some memory of red shoes on her feet, of brown tiles beneath these shoes.She stops it there. Stops the memory and fills herself up with breath. Her lips droop slightly, drop toward her jawbone, lose their stiffness for a moment. Frances strengthens the knot of her fingers. Frances digs her toes into the floorboards. She feels the vertebrae in her neck creak as she turns her head, hears the children’s feet clop like echoes through the glass. She turns away from them and presses her hands into the seat of the couch to lift herself.Little red shoes and brown tile beneath these shoes, she thinks, and in her mind she jumps from tile to tile, avoiding the white lines between. Her body is small and easy to move. Her brain is simple and fluid. But when Frances looks down she sees socks instead of shoes, floorboards beneath these socks. Her body is tall and stuttering. Her skull feels swollen and heavy. She has the taste of blood on her tongue: she’s bitten it, cut it open in her concentration, her jumping. But where was she jumping, and to what? A silence curdles up from the cracks in the laminate flooring. The living room is quiet around her. The house is quiet. Her roommates are gone, out to class, and she is alone and curled up inside herself, and the walls are very thin, she feels, she can feel the wind through the wallpaper.Frances sees those little red shoes—they hang in front of her eyes—as she goes through the kitchen at the back of the house to the basement door. She moves through the basement door and down into the basement, to her bedroom where the window looks out onto the backyard, away from the street and the children.She closes the door behind her.In four months she’ll be finished university, gone from this house. Frances closes her eyes and imagines herself invisible. She lies down in her bed and unrolls her invisible toes.

About the Author

Erica McKeen was born in London, Ontario. She studied at Western University, and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, longlisted for the Guernica Prize, and shortlisted for The Malahat Review Open Season Awards. Her stories have been published in PRISM international, filling Station, The Dalhousie Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. Tear is her first novel.

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