jacks: a gothic gospel

Shannon Emmerson

In the note accom­pa­ny­ing Geist’s copy of jacks: a gothic gospel (Livres DC Books), the book’s author Anne Stone rec­om­mends it for review, or for “hang­ing out on a cof­fee table as an orange object.” And, although it is a lovely orange object, jacks is also worth a thor­ough read. It tan­gles the reader in a kind of rhyth­mic spell, which Stone achieves in part by cre­at­ing care­fully skewed rep­e­ti­tions, echo­ing sig­nif­i­cant words, phrases and char­ac­ters in slightly dif­fer­ent ways. The book’s many “jacks” are among these off-kilter echoes, which include a series of vio­lent, sex­u­ally preda­tory or just plain strange male fig­ures derived from mem­ory or leg­ends: one-eyed jack, jack frost, jack-in-the-box, hoodoo jack, jack spratt and oth­ers. These very creepy men seem always to be lurk­ing in and on the edges of Stone’s eerily nor­mal­ized land­scape, replete with fish store rooftops, Bosque Perdue swamp­lands, blank rooms and river-bottom muck, jacks’ plot is bound to the dark child­hood mem­o­ries of a char­ac­ter named Hermeline, and cen­tres on Hermeline’s var­ied attempts to tell her dif­fi­cult, often vio­lent story. It emerges like a series of child­hood mem­o­ries she can’t shake, mem­o­ries that become increas­ingly clouded by the opin­ions and responses of those in whom she con­fides — includ­ing a series of psy­chi­a­trists and the reader. The story becomes its own untelling, and our final glimpse is of Hermeline sweep­ing, sweep­ing, “because the sweep­ing is never done, never done, never never never.” jacks is a dif­fi­cult book to grasp log­i­cally, but its mood, land­scape and char­ac­ters, and its jacks-game rhythm, are unusual and unset­tling. It also looks nice on a cof­fee table.