Summer of the Cicadas

by Chelsea Catherine

Overview

Summer of the Cicadas is about a West Virginian town where a brood of Magicicadas emerges for the first time in seventeen years. The cicadas damage crops and trees, and swarm locals. Jessica, a former cop whose entire family was killed in a car crash two years earlier, is deputized during the crisis. Throughout the book, Jessica must deal with her feelings for her sister’s best friend, Natasha, who is a town council member. After Fish and Wildlife removes the swarm, Jessica must also confront the two-year anniversary of her family’s death, Natasha’s budding romance with a local editor, as well as a sudden but devastating loss that changes everything.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597094832
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	08/18/2020
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Chelsea Catherine is a PEN Short Story Prize Nominee, a winner of the Raymond Carver Fiction Contest in 2016, a Sterling Watson fellow, and an Ann McKee Grant recipient. Her novella Blindsided won the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize and was published in October of 2018. Her nonfiction recently won the Mary C. Mohr Award through the Southern Indiana Review. A native Vermonter, Catherine lived in Key West for two years where she was secretary of the Key West Writers Guild. She now lives in St. Petersburg, FL.

Read an Excerpt

The storm ends eventually. The house stops shaking and the noises outside cease. I’m good and drunk by then and crawl out of the closet space under the stairs on my hands and knees. I move to the window and look out into the night. My phone says it’s one a.m., but I have no service.

Four days until the anniversary now.

I peer out into the darkness. Some tree branches have fallen in the yard. Small pieces of wood, halved and broken, muck the grass. Otherwise, not much seems to have happened. The house sounds intact, at least from here. After lying on the wood floor for a while, I go to the window where the cicada was and check the old oak tree. My head spins as I shine a light into the night.

There’s nothing there, so I figure the storm must’ve scared them away. I wonder if they’re gone from the rest of the town or if they’ve lingered, hunkered down under the thick pine leaves and branches.

After a while, I decide to go to bed, but not before checking my phone again for service. There’s nothing. I pull up my text thread with Natasha. The last thing she wrote me was, Are you coming or no?

I enter the text box. Write, I love you, you know. Send the text.

Then I clamber upstairs, kicking my socks off at the top. I pad down the hall, pausing for a moment at Meg’s room before passing by it. I grab the pillow that Natasha used the other night and return to Meg’s old bed. The sheets are starchy, unused. I bring the pillow to my chest and breathe in, trying to catch Natasha’s scent, but it just smells like pine from the house. My eyes close.

I think about how it is to sleep forever and to not have to face the sun or the night or anything in between. I think about how quiet it must be—and good. It must be nice for dead people. Moving from place to place. Never held down. I wonder if it’s beautiful or if it’s just darkness and nothing for the rest of forever.

+

The sunlight behind me is momentarily blocked by clouds, removing the warmth from my back. I shiver. The rules are the same as they would be anywhere. Be wary, walk in groups. Don’t touch the crops. Let us know if you see anything suspicious. I’ve done this before. In DC, I did it a million times. But now I feel this hesitation, like I don’t actually know what I’m doing anymore. “Call Mason,” I say. “See if he’ll get her to do it.”

Brenda looks at me. A smile crosses her face. She touches my forearm, rolling the fabric of the uniform between her fingers. The warmth of her hand bleeds through to my skin. “Still fits you good.”

Brenda was there when Mason dragged me into that cell. She visited in the wee hours of the morning when I was detoxing and sweating and crying and wanting to die. She put a cool towel on my forehead and told me it would pass soon, I just had to hang on.

I still want to die sometimes, but I’m better at pretending. And she’s still around, laying her hand on my shoulder like I fucking matter.

Editorial Reviews

09/07/2020

Catherine wraps a fast-paced, stirring narrative about loss and unrequited love into a story about an unusually aggressive 17-year cicada swarm and the terror it brings to the residents of a West Virginia town. Jessica, a former cop, works as a security guard at the town hall, where she pines for councilwoman Natasha and regrets losing her badge amid grief over the death of her sister and parents in a car crash two years earlier, which led to a pain pill addiction and side work as a stripper to support the habit, and her eventual firing. When the cicadas start attacking people, Jessica is deputized by her former department to lend a hand. While dealing with the violent and large insects, Jessica must also deal with her feelings for Natasha, and the heartache of the upcoming anniversary of her family’s death. This bleak, slim novel packs a great deal of insight into depression, desire, and substance abuse from the perspective of a gay woman struggling to move forward in her life (“I still want to die sometimes, but I’m better at pretending”), and the merciless cicadas make for a moving metaphor of the wreckage Jessica must face and overcome. Catherine’s frightening vision makes for a worthy exercise in small-town horror. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Chelsea Catherine is a bright, raw, original new voice in American fiction. Her prose is electric. And Summer of Cicadas was a novel I couldn’t put down."—Thomas Christopher Greene, author of The Perfect Liar 

"Many authors are good at writing about the body. Few authors excel at writing the body of the world, the way it moves through everyone: cicadas owning us, making us restless, flirtatious, fearful even; shadows hiding our shadows; the defeating pines; the teasing sun. Chelsea Catherine creates a natural world as real as her characters. But it’s not about her deft ability at description or setting; it’s about her deep understanding of how everything moves as one—people, moods, moments, manifestations—and the modern Romance (with a capital R) of it all."—Erica Dawson, author of When Rap Spoke Straight to God

"Catherine wraps a fast-paced, stirring narrative about loss and unrequited love into a story about an unusually aggressive 17-year cicada swarm and the terror it brings to the residents of a West Virginia town."—Publisher's Weekly

"We see the author’s ability to understand how everything comes together including terror and love." —Amos Lassen

"Readers who enjoy stories about plucky teens in peril will find Musick’s novel well written. And because Clare’s viewpoint is so literal, the crimes are more horrific—and the redemption even sweeter." —Shelf Media Group

From the Publisher