Shane Jones’ Light Boxes: A Review By Salvatore Pane

It’s easy to see why Spike Jonze bought the film rights to Shane Jones‘  debut novel  Light Boxes. Jones is an image junkie and delivers  one imaginative set piece after another in this meta-fantasy about a town suffering through a year-long February. Readers are treated to visions of moss eating up horses, men wearing top hats and different colored bird masks, dual holes in the sky that lead somewhere sinister, an underground series of tunnels populated by children, and a host of other breathtaking images. It’s no hyperbole to say that Shane Jones has delivered one of the — if not the — most imaginative novels of the year.

The plot of  Light Boxes is deceptively simple: a man named Thaddeus leads the town insurrection against February after his daughter is kidnapped by a mystical entity also known as February. The book packs a high concept twist that no reviewer should reveal (although already many have), and your take on said twist will greatly impact your opinion on the book. But Shane Jones is obviously more concerned with images and language than character and plot, and at the book’s very slim 145 pages, this lack doesn’t come off as a glaring omission. Light Boxes is not prose poetry but comes quite close in its lyricism. A thrown branch is described this way:

It flies up, much higher than I imagined, and, climbing higher and higher, it rips through a cloud’s leg, peaks in flight, then descends again, tearing another hole through the shoulder of the cloud.

A town-wide panic is described like this:

[a man] cut his wrists open in the middle of the street, and dead vines poured from his body, grew through the street and covered a cottage. Shopkeepers wept through the night. The beekeepers had their bees sting their necks in order to stop their crying. Snow mixed with ice and a sheet of lightning fell from the sky.

The language is beautiful and a deep sadness permeates the novel. If there’s any misstep, it’s the characters;  Light Boxes is fable-esque and its characters are appropriately undefined. I imagine we’re supposed to be very moved when Thaddeus, after seeing something disturbing, refuses to move for over a day. But I didn’t feel as much as I suspected I was supposed to, probably because I found it difficult to care about the characters. And that’s a small complaint when the obvious star of the show is Jones’ imagery and prose.

Light Boxes is not for every reader. It’s heavy on imagery, low on character, and ephemeral in the best possible sense. However, it’s definitely a good fit for the  PANK reader, and if you’re digging the work on this website, you absolutely owe to yourself to check out this book. Do yourself a favor and read it before the Spike Jonze flick comes out so you can seem all knowledgeable and shit.