TEAR
Invisible Publishing, 2022
A reclamation of female rage and a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman.
Winner of the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
Shortlisted for the ReLit Awards
A Globe and Mail best book of 2022
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.
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Tear is at once a moment, a novel, and a life. Drawing on Mary Shelley and creating something all her own, Erica McKeen writes with urgency and mastery. The elliptical movement of time draws the story in and out like a breath. Memory, experience, and imagination collapse into a dizzying narrative of grief, isolation, and illness, spanning years of a young student’s life, reaching to the depths of her inner turmoil, and the depths of her basement apartment. In prose rich with texture, Tear throbs on the page, holds one in its grip until it’s finished. McKeen writes like she can’t help it.
Fawn parker
Giller-Nominated author of what we both know
An unnerving study of isolation and alienation, Tear pulls at the threads of a fraying border between the real and the monstrous uncanny. McKeen’s prose is taut and evocative; the novel simmers with repressed rage and then confronts us with its thrilling and terrifying transmutation. A fearless and unforgettable debut.
aimee wall
Giller-nominated author of we, jane
Clarice Lispector meets Daphne du Maurier in Erica McKeen’s beautiful, surreal debut. One of the novel’s brilliant inventions is a dire space, just off to one side of consciousness, where bodies and minds dissolve and gather new form, where loneliness is so real it comes alive. With animistic, lugubrious prose, McKeen pulls the reader into the visionary emptiness of Frances James’s alienation, toward a magnificent, exhilarating study of reality and self. Like a ghost haunting her own life, Frances shocked me with her uncanniness and moved me with her need. Here, distortions are as exquisite as they are grotesque. This is triumphant terror.
Seyward Goodhand
author of even that wildest hope