Shadowselves
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Speculative and darkly surreal, the stories in Shadowselves examine characters who have stepped dangerously close to an edge they cannot see. A snow plow driver stranded on the roadside during a blizzard finds himself trapped in a riddled memory. A middle-aged man wakes up one morning to find he’s gained four hundred pounds overnight, along with the unbearable regrets of countless strangers. A lonely child sets off to prove the existence of a mythic bird, but uncovers an ugly secret on the other side of town. A comatose teenage outcast traverses the liminal space between life and death. With a sometimes-tenuous grip on reality, and often haunted by mistakes, repressions, and alternate versions of who they might have been, the characters in Shadowselves struggle to find meaningful human connections in a world where the most important things always seem just out of their reach.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ockert (Wasp Box) delights with his latest, a collection full of quirky and original characters who inhabit a gothic landscape in Florida, "the kickstand of the country." Many are haunted by "the shadowself," a force that propels or holds back their doomed-to-fail actions. In "Golden Vulture," 10-year-old Hoyt has a plan to pluck the feathers from a golden-winged turkey vulture and become rich, until his shadowself realizes the gold on the bird's feathers is only yellow paint. In "The Immortal Jellyfish," teenager Clayton Kershaw slips into a coma after a bicycle accident, and his friend Nina makes it her goal to cheer him up by capturing and then promising to show him a nude photograph of her volleyball coach. Elsewhere, Ockert commits to fantastical conceits: when passengers on an airliner release their collective anguish in "Your Nearest Exit May Be Behind You," it falls over Florida onto a high school teacher named Zig Botham, who gains 400 pounds as a result. Ockert is a natural heir to the grotesquery of Flannery O'Connor with his interest in misfits and his dark, powerful language. The author deserves a wider audience for his risk-taking and wonderfully realized voice.
