Now that Lost has shuffled off into the bright white light, are you hungry for entertainment aggravatingly ambiguous but shot through with lyrical brilliance?
Boy, have we got the book for you.
Shane Jones‘ debut novel Light Boxes was originally published last year by tiny outfit Publishing Genius Press; the initial print run of 500 copies sold out fast, Spike Jonze picked up the film rights, and big gun Penguin Books stepped in to reprint the book, which goes on sale today.
Press materials describe Light Boxes as “light-hearted,” which is an odd choice of words for a bleak book about a tiny town’s war with god-like February, who wages winter for 900 days straight and bans all manner of flight. Children go missing, there’s slaughter in the streets, mothers and fathers die as much from the heartbreak as from the unbroken cold, and turns out February didn’t even mean to make war – he was just kinda lonely.
At least, we think he was lonely. Jones’ slim book – 145 pages made even shorter by lots of blank space and big fonts – poses more questions than it answers (sound familiar?), and I’m not entirely sure if it all hangs together (stop me if you’ve heard this one before). But Light Boxes really does have some lovely writing and fantastical imagery that we haven’t been able to shake.
We’re pretty firmly on the fence on this one – if only it weren’t so precious, you know? – but we’re eager for everybody else to read the book so we can talk about it some more – and by “talk” we mean argue, wildly speculate, and troll the Internet for zanier and zanier theories. Something’s got to fill the void, right?
This article appears in May 21 • 2010.
