JEDI Summer: with The Magnetic Kid
John Boden
Post Mortem Press
July, 2016
Reviewed by David Goudsward
The summer of 1983 wasn’t the worst time to be a kid. Cabbage Patch dolls and the Atari 5200 were the new things. Fraggle Rock premiered on HBO. Of course, that was for the fortunate kids. For teenager Johnny and his young brother Roscoe, pushing each other down the hill in a cardboard box and old VHS tapes were as close to store bought diversions as it got. And, as well might be expected in 1983, the one major activity was waiting for that one special film. Return of the Jedi had been released but hadn’t been out long enough to hit the small cinemas in the mountain towns of central Pennsylvania.
Johnny is growing up, and trying simultaneously be a big brother and a father figure for Roscoe. It’s tough coming-of-age in a town where glimpses of the macabre and supernatural hide in plain view. Ghosts, visions, metaphoric manifestation – even Roscoe is part of the odd tapestry in town. He sees and talks to his pets that are long dead. Johnny, on the other hand, is more concerned about his own aching heart than Roscoe chatting with canine spirits.
The countdown to Return of the Jedi is also a countdown to the end of childhood, a summer journey cleverly immersed in early eighties references and with subtle paranormal suggestions that something bigger is going on in town in the background. Author Boden uses neither plot line to excess yet both are always there creating a sense that the past and the future are vying for the reader’s attention in the present. The result is a revitalizing look back at those childhood flights of fancy about what lies in the darkness outside the window each night, giving JEDI Summer: with The Magnetic Kid a cognitive dissonance of foreboding nostalgia – equal parts Peter Pan, Stephen King’s The Body, and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Narrated by Johnny at some point in his future, it is his recollection of that summer and how it reflects the fleeting nature of youth and the ephemeralness of life, regardless of how weird things are around you. In other words, ignore that ghost in the woods and the skeleton in the tree with the bird’s nest in its chest; embrace both the present and the presence.
