REVIEW: Shadowselves by Jason Ockert

Fiction. 192 pgs. Dzanc Books. February 2022. 9781950539390.

Disclaimer: Bridge Eight published “Y’Idiot” – featured in Shadowselves – you can read it here.

My daughter started walking this week. At ten months old, it feels like she barely crawled. I don’t think this is what Jason Ockert means by a “shadowself” but it’s my immediate relation to the term. The stages through which my daughter has passed are already countless. The versions of myself are too.

She and I are battle shadowselves every day. Maybe not battle. Reluctantly carry, then.

Ockert’s new collection features the usual (and delicious) Ockert brand of magic: boys learning something about life a little too early; animals that may or may not harness special powers; a triggering carcass; a surreal exploration of what we carry.

It all makes for a good beer of a read. The perfect caloric intake to leave you buzzed and emotionally moved without warning.

Ockert’s most effective skill (not to be confused with his greatest strength) is his ability to completely shift point-of-view without rupturing the wombs of his stories. Whether it be the shift between Clay and Nina in “The Immortal Jellyfish” or Bister and Julie in “Where the Survivors are Buried,” Ockert never sacrifices the all-encompassing tone of the story. Instead, the move adds a glaze to the narrative, as if the characters have been marinating in his noggin for quite some time.

If you’ve read and enjoyed Rabbit Punches or Neighbors of Nothing, you’ll find yourself right at home with Shadowselves. Ockert’s writing is unapologetically filled with Ockert’s brand of magic, which can feel fresh in a time of too much uncertainty. He’s unafraid to be the southern-ish writer consumed with adolescence and arrested development. And who can blame him? The sublime is found between mundanity, not above it.

That doesn’t mean the book isn’t home to a new trick or two. “Your Nearest Exit May Be Behind You” concerns an anomalous flight in which every passenger suddenly loses 10.6 pounds, the exact weight of a specific grief, and the stranger who absorbs all their lost weight overnight.

Shadowselves is seasoned well with these surreal moments. Enough so, the reader feels compelled to touch the pages and remind themselves what is tangible and within reach.

This is literally true in “Erase the Days”—the most resonant story to this reader—which is most certainly not about a school shooting. So much so, that any mention of a gun, a shooter, or shooting-related violence is redacted from the story. Bring the pages as close to your eyes as you want. Your only hope is to read between the lines, not through them.

The kids don’t talk about Bruno. The dads don’t talk about the Boogieman. That’s how you make them disappear.

Throughout the collection, Ockert reintroduces this idea of the “shadowself” and how, like Peter Pan, we can never really shake it,

“Sometimes Hoyt feels an entity beside him. It’s a warm pulse of energy that suddenly descends for no discernable reason. It only appears when the boy blinks which means he can never see it. The thrumming energy is a version of himself—a shadowself—living in the past or else a heartbeat in the future. Sometimes the shadowself is trying to hold him back. Sometimes it tugs him forward.”

Hoyt isn’t the only character to feel this tugging back and forth. The characters aren’t alone either. Ockert’s writing is a soft reminder of our recent and not-so recent pasts, as well as a gentle nudge to consider our future.

How did you get here? Is this who you want to be? Is this what you want?