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REVIEW: Ghost stories with Elizabeth McCracken and Edward Carey

By Loren Keller

Reading from new works Thursday night, novelists and spouses Edward Carey and Elizabeth McCracken offered complementary stories of loss: one of a young girl left an orphan by the suicide of her mother and the other of a mother haunted by the death of her young daughter.

In some ways their respective works of fiction mirror a sad reality: McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir, due in September, details the loss of the couple’s baby boy two years ago during her ninth month of pregnancy. (The couple, both visiting instructors at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, have since become the parents of a healthy one-year-old boy.)

Taking the podium on the stage of Theatre Cedar Rapids first, Carey read from a French Revolution-period historical novel he’s been working on for five years and hopes to finish by the end of summer. Though more factually-based than his first two novels, Observatory Mansions and Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City, the new work sounded like vintage Carey: a fantastical, gothic fairy-tale.

The narrator of the section he read Thursday is a seven-year-old girl who moves with her mother to Bern, Switzerland in 1767 following the death of her father. They take up residence with a young doctor and his ghastly collection of severed body parts, from which he creates wax replicas.

The pale, sunken-cheeked man is an exceedingly polite but slightly nervous character prone to clapping his hands to himself in gleeful excitement. The mother and daughter meet him working in a room with three tongues: a severed one, its wax duplicate and the doctor’s own, sticking out as he concentrates on his task.

The doctor (whose name sounded like “Dr. Courteous”) is clearly proud of his work: “Me, I made them! Every one. Out of wax!” he says. “They look real. Don’t they look real?”

One day the young narrator delivers to the doctor a parcel containing “a bit of gut,” Carey writes. A short time later, the girl’s horrified mother, who has been working as the doctor’s housekeeper, hangs herself in the attic late at night, leaving the orphaned girl to wonder if she’ll soon be floating in liquid on one of the doctor’s shelves.

McCracken followed with a reading of a short story called “Something Amazing,” the tale of a mother, Pamela, who lost her young daughter Missy five years earlier and remains haunted by her ghost. The neighborhood kids thinks Pamela is a witch, who the author describes as an “immaculate vegetable substance; pale, thin.”

Pamela thinks she may be allergic (and here McCracken offers a long list of pollutants that may be inside the house, just as Carey, even fonder of lists, had read a detailed catalogue of the body parts in the home of his novel’s Swiss doctor) and tries to seal her house tight from “Missy the allergen, Missy the poison.”

Recalling an inquiry from the once-living Missy about Mexican jumping beans – “Worms? How do we feed them?” Missy asks -- Pamela wonders if her house is the bean and she is the worm, or if she is the bean and the worm is her soul.

More than 60 people attended the authors’ appearances last night at Theatre Cedar Rapids, a venue as ideally suited for low-key readings as it is for larger stage productions. Hats off to everyone involved in the Metro Library Network’s “Out Loud!” author series for delivering an event of such high caliber and class.

Cedar Rapids native and thriller writer John Sandford continues the “Out Loud!” series with a reading at TCR on June 19.