In Small Altars, Justin Gardiner delves into the world of comic books and superheroes as a means for coming to terms with the many struggles of his brother’s life, as well as his untimely death, offering a lyric and honest portrayal of the tolls of mental illness, the redemptive powers of art and familial love, and the complex workings of grief.
Small Altars is structured in short sections recalling the panels of a comic book—some taking surprising shapes, some flashing forward or backward in time, but each contributing to the motion (and emotion) of the whole.
The book also steps away, periodically, from the intimacy of its narrative, adapting the format of a glossary of terms which layer together the vocabularies of comic books with the terminologies and diagnoses related to cancer and schizophrenia. Small Altars offers a testament to how our most private stories often prove to be both minor and grand, heroic and heartbreaking in turn.