I usually don't review books by GR friends, when such are offered, because I'd probably be overly harsh as some kind of overcompensation for favorable bias. Put differently, friends have to work harder to impress me if I'm approaching their work in any critical manner. Which is why I'm especially happy about how good Jeff Jackson's debut novel is. I don't have any reservations about its excellence. 
 Mira Corpora presents itself in an explanatory Author's note as an adaptation of Jeff Jackson's own childhood-to-teen journals. The veracity of this statement is immediately called into question by several factors: 
 -The author (Jeff Jackson) immediately admits difficulty separating dream from reality. 
 -The narrator ("Jeff Jackson") is never seen writing anything, and for certain periods would seem to be incapable of doing so at all. 
 -These events could not possibly be true. 
 Or are they, instead, all too true? Denial doesn't negate them, and there's a raw emotion and urgency underlying the whole that makes it seem impossible that the book isn't real. In some sense. 
 Of course, it's both. Of course, most books are. Perhaps stories are truer for the insight and elaboration that fiction allows. Perhaps, as Leonora Carrington wrote in The Stone Door, all stories are true. 
 Regardless, the stories here are in many ways perfect. I say stories, as there's an episodic compartmentalization into ideal units taking place, but this is very much a cohesive novel, one whose sustained effect gradually picks up power from the echo-chamber of its parts, within and without the narrative itself. Each section, spaced at several year intervals, seems condensed from universal experience into a series of casual, terrible epiphanic moments. Casual is a voice thing, the whole unfolds with a casual lyricism that betrays extreme fine-craftsmanship without sounding labored or removed from its inherent rawness and urgency. The result is a near-symbolist refinement of event and image into simple-but-brilliant glyphs and sigils. It is in these that the novel's essential truth is secured. These events have too diamond-sharp and hallucinatory a clarity to be true, they encapsulate too much with too refined a dark elegance not to be. 
 The spell broke, for me, at only one point. In an interval on the streets of a major city, "Jeff Jackson" is revived by the obsessive mystery of a disappeared musician. The band in question is identifiable, even if it's meant to be entirely fictionalized. I remember when I first heard them, I was also impressed, I still am -- but spotting this band took me out of the experience. Because no real musician, however notable, could bear the weight of Mira Corpora's own myth-making. 
 This complaint is a kind of fore-handed insult. The one section is weaker because no pinpoint "real" detail can support the novel's otherwise iconic force. This point is at the heart of its complex, delicate mechanics of truth and fiction, distillation and embellishment, distance and emotion.