Tear

“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.”—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—become us—without anyone even noticing. … It offers up the truly destructive forces of human emotion and human neglect, and gives us a loss that matters—excruciatingly so.”—Stacey May Fowles, in Book Therapy for Open Book

“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, author of What We Both Know

“Where does trauma make its home? What shape does it take when it is suppressed, left to wander the hallways of our minds, linger in the spaces between? Tear puts these questions at its core, spinning them into a twilight world where materiality and metaphor collide as trauma becomes embodied in its quest to live and be heard. … [What results] is a gripping, frightening novel with a deeply gothic sensibility somewhere between Henry James and Shirley Jackson. […] Tear is a delightfully creepy, lyrical novel.”—Broken Pencil

“Tear is a melodious novel reckoning with adolescence, the complexities of home and the body. Mckeen’s protagonist, Frances James, is both bewildering and brilliant as she is introspective, navigating her isolated life in London, Ontario. She is a character whose pain and memory works to unearth a turbulent hunger for the past parts of herself, a hunger that will not subside. It is a hunger readers will begin to feel, too, as they immerse themselves in this luscious and monstrously deep work of horror.”—Mallory Tater, author of This Will Be Good and The Birth Yard

” “Tear” as in ripping a page from a book, rejecting a storyline. “Tear” as in a tear-stained face, letting out a scream. Tear, a haunting homonym…Readers will feel the prose simmering on their skin as they witness a surreal journey in a musty basement.”—Rachel Shabalin, Filling Station

“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, author of We, Jane

“This haunting, disorienting tale traces Frances’s descent into madness with empathetic precision…There’s heartbreak in the girlhood silences of Tear, a hallucinatory psychological horror novel in which you only have to watch out for the quiet ones because no one watched out for them.”—Michelle Schingler, Foreword Review

“Dark and unsettling, Tear gives us a portrait of sensitive, artistic Frances and her subsequent isolation that turns into a vivid inward journey. This novel is feverish and eerie with much to say about the impact of early memories on our adult lives, as well as on our dreams and psyche. Frances’s internal descent is vivid, captivating, and at times jarring.”—Sophie McCreesh, author of Once More, With Feeling

“Is Frances James sleeping or dead? Is she trapped in one of her grandfather’s macabre stories? Did her childhood best friend imagine her into existence? McKeen’s debut is a story about stories: a scratching sound emanates from the walls, doors are suddenly and unexpectedly locked, a tree grows around a baby rabbit’s skull, and a young woman wiggles her toes to remind herself that she is real. Tear is a startling novel about monstrosity, femininity, and embodiment that leaves us with the impression that the most uncanny spaces—and the ones we should be most frightened of—are the homes we live within. With Tear, McKeen shows a unique and striking voice that will haunt readers long after they’ve turned the last page.”—Amy LeBlanc, author of I Know Something You Don’t Know and Unlocking

“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