Thunderstruck & Other Stories

A young girl's ghost, two three-legged dogs, and a comatose American preteen in Paris are a few of the characters who live inside McCracken's bizarre and magnetic gallery of short fiction. In "Something Amazing," a woman is haunted by the recent death of her six-year-old daughter but discovers some release and joy in an unexpected place. "Some Terpsichore" tells how the strange love between a man who plays a saw with a bowlike instrument and his wife, whose singing voice mimics the sound of the musical saw, flickers out when he becomes depressive and physically abusive. At the heart of these pieces and her collection as a whole, McCracken (The Giant's House) examines the connections among human beings and what happens when they lose one another. Through death, medical trauma, or some other mystery or disappearance, life changes for the individuals in these stories, not only for those who are left behind to live with the memory of their loved ones but for neighbors, acquaintances, and even strangers.