Two Dollar Radio, 182 pages, paperback, $11.04

The onslaught of awful novels that claim to be coming-of-age stories has forced me to systematically try to avoid a very large percentage of the narratives categorized as such. Luckily, there are a handful of outstanding books that are so far removed from the bland, trope-heavy majority that they save the genre by taking it to places where it’s never been. Jeff Jackson’s Mira Corpora is one of those novels, and pushing the coming-of-age tale into the top echelon of literary fiction is only one of the many things it accomplishes.

Mira Corpora charts the journey of a young man named Jeff who runs away from home in order to escape violence and bleakness. The narrative follows Jeff as he joins a colony of outcast children who live in the woods and believe in teenage oracles, gets handed a mysterious cassette tapes that leads him and a band of ragtag misfits on wild chase for a reclusive underground rockstar who may or may not be alive, and eventually finds himself out of the woods but in place that makes the brutality of the life he lead back home look like a sweet dream.

At once a thinly veiled autobiography, an exploration of youth and all its pain, weirdness, and resilience, and a superb adventure that shows how a boy can survive almost everything in order to become a fractured man (but a man nonetheless), Mira Corpora is an outstanding narrative delivered with the kind of feverish prose than demands attention and with enough power to make it memorable. Jackson, who is an accomplished playwright, writes with a bizarre mixture of honesty and a knack for the fantastic that, besides forcefully keeping the reader’s eye on the page, makes the narrative hover above the dividing line between commonplace viciousness and otherworldly experiences. The result is a story that’s gripping, candid, and astonishingly raw:

“For the first week I’m there, it rains constantly. I help the kids with chores around the camp. The soles of my feet are perpetually soggy. The ghostly skin becomes so soft that I can scrape off ribbons of white flesh with my fingernail. Little mossy growths start to infest the scraggly hairs of my armpits. Even my cassettes begin to bloat with water and breed black spores. It’s the happiest I’ve ever been.”

Mira Corpora is the kind of novel that’s at once easily digestible due to the author’s straightforward prose and incredibly dense because it invites the reader to deconstruct the very personal experiences presented in order to fully understand them. However, maximum enjoyment is probably found somewhere in the middle; by doing a reading that both revels in Jackson’s superb storytelling skills and delves into the significance of major events without attempting a full analysis that could intellectualize the passages that can cut to the reader’s marrow.

Perhaps the best thing about this novel is the shifting nature of the story itself. In that regard, Mira Corpora defies classification and becomes a powerful amalgamation of the best element of a plethora of genres. There’s horror, suspense, violence, adventure, mystery, a touch of Lord of the Flies, a very theatric approach to bodies and rituals, escape, and everything in between.

“Ignore the body on the floor. It’s just earning a living. Gert-Jan instructs the partygoers to step over it as they ferry rounds of drinks from the kitchen to the den. Everyone is careful not to disturb the body’s composure. It lies face-down in a puddle created by the unplugged refrigerator. Its skinny arms are bound behind its back with black bandanas. The tag around its neck reads ‘My Name Is Jeff.’ The body is mine, technically speaking. But let’s not get hung up on unnecessary details.”

If coming-of-age tales are usually feel-good narratives, then this is the exact opposite. The beautiful writing makes the gloominess shine, but that glossiness is only a distraction that keeps the reader unaware of how the dark bits are getting under his or her skin. There’s a healthy dose of unpleasantness here, but Mira Corpora somehow inflicts all the damage in an undeniably pleasurable way.

—

Gabino Iglesias is writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. He’s the author of Gutmouth and a few other things no one will ever read. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.