Playwright Jeff Jackson's first novel, Mira Corpora, resides on that ethereal continuum between fiction and memoir. Overtly fantastic episodes burst through its earnest sense of reality, each pained step toward adulthood vibrating with psychotropic energy.
Beginning with the murky, earliest memories of childhood, the narrator (also named "Jeff Jackson") recalls the traumatic realization of his mother's abuse. Fleeing her, he finds himself among a near-tribal, faux-mystical scene of rejects and runaways, like a gutter punk Catcher in the Rye. While the reader may never be privy to the exact reasons for Jackson's semi-autobiographical conceit, one can glimpse the beautiful agitation universal to the coming-of-age experience: tenuous, gullible eagerness; bracing determination; fumbling assertions of independence against cravings for belonging, like the many slavering dogs roaming the city streets.
Chapter by chapter, Jackson leaps ahead in time to demark and distill the perpetually rainy turning points that usher him into increasingly mature iterations of himself. At 12, he is clambering through a soggy forest with a group of teens to the auspicious outpost of an oracle presumed to prophesy over his destiny. At 14, he is sidling through filthy alleys with disciples of a musical genius purported to have gone insane. At 15, he is fleeing the devious machinations of a man preying on the lost and forgotten for his own demented games.
Mira Corpora develops with the kind of halting detours that instill within our formative years--no matter how devastating and unusual--an invaluable education, to be remembered our whole lives. --Dave Wheeler, bookseller, The Elliott Bay Book Co., Seattle, Wash.