The title story of Elizabeth McCracken's second collection of short fiction, Thunderstruck, concludes the book and begins with a disappearance. It's a distillation, a concentration of the themes that whip and wend through these extraordinary and resonant fictions. In this story, the absence is resolved within the first sentence: in the preceding eight stories, the missing are gone, and the left behind are left to cope in the aftermath.
It's common to praise stories as having the heft and weight of novels, as compressed and breathing worlds in miniature, but Thunderstruck works not only as a grouping of such stories, but as a convincing, compelling whole. There is only one inter-textual link between the nine stories, yet together they bring unexpected depths to McCracken's radiant prose and cast of lost, lonely souls.
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