Short Story Review || Jack O'Dander (2023)
"The sister of an abducted child is haunted by a sinister figure who may or may not be real."
: 🌕 : SPOILER ALERT : 🌕 :
The stories that line the darkness of childhood present the twisting curtain call of imagination. During recess & sleepovers, carefully told between friends or as a taunted tale by an enemy, the fabled lore of scary stories demonizes the innocence of the young mind, by whose very nature the tale becomes one of immeasurable truth & possibility. For Natalie, the creeping tale of a man wandering outside a school ground sets the tone for a terror that will warp her mind into a sewer scape from which the truth will never escape.
“It’s a eureka moment. The truth has crystallised in trying to talk it through. I was so angry at Isobel, but she was only a child.”
I was apprehensive about reading this story. I attribute this to the summary, which indicates the essence of the narrative without necessarily clarifying its purpose. Natalie, the younger sister who was left behind following her sister’s abduction, presents as a character I found difficult to appreciate. The story is known to the reader before they endeavour to meet Natalie & therefore the author has her work cut out for her before the character makes her way onto the page. Natalie needed to be a person with depth for the cruelty of her childhood experience to become a tangible terror that scurries along the spine of the reader. This was not to be the case.
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In essence, this is a story about grief. When Natalie & Isobel were young, their family travelled to Spain on a joint family trip with their aunt, uncle, & older cousin. The families were having a rough time as the matriarchs bumbled through frustrations about their sister relationship that had been brewing for decades.
All the while, the children, like in some 1950s commercial, wander in the background with a cellphone, watching videos of a man who watches children. This video acts as the catalyst for Isobel’s kidnapping. During an evening in which the parents are arguing, the mother screaming & angry, the father chasing after them, a man enters the room where Isobel & Natalie lie sleeping.
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There is a great deal to dissect in this story. The reader will note the tone of frustration adopted throughout this review & may be at their leisure to conclude that I found this story to be quite frustrating. My opinion derives from the lack of a decided narrative; whereas Natalie is a troubled, traumatized adult who would do better to involve herself with a psychiatrist rather than group talk-therapy, the story does not necessarily seem concerned with what could be done to better the characters. Indeed, the narrative’s focus is on uncovering the truth, but it does not seem to understand what that is.
Trying to organize my thoughts, I note that the story does include a mention of a complicated family dynamic. The matriarchs’ fight & is uncomfortable throughout the story due to Natalie’s mother’s inability to move past the wrong she felt had been done to her. Her character is angry almost all the time, & although a reader might forgive her for this, if only partially, seeing as her daughter was kidnapped, it becomes apparent that this anger is a staple of her personality.
Rather than choose to grow past the elements of her life that brought her so much frustration, or rather, as she chooses not to address them, the narrative makes clear that this decision was made without proper thought. All the more unfortunate this is as the reality of growing up in a home with so much anger reeks a devastating consequence on her daughters.
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Natalie is presented to the reader as a troubled child. Her parents bicker & frown at each other & there seems to be little room within the home for a child who is following in the footsteps of an elder daughter who has been able to adapt to the traumatic lifestyle of her mother.
I found it odd that Natalie should feel such resentment towards Isobel & in some sense, have wished for her to have been kidnapped. Of course, while reading, a person may conclude that Natalie was a very young child; she had not yet turned ten. Isobel was praised for all that she did & in retrospect, she appeared to have had to adapt rather quickly to the environment in which she had no choice but to live.
Professionals in the field of child psychology, & schools of thought that study the impacts of trauma on a child, have raised the question of why a child might not feel comfortable telling their parent about what they experienced. It is a harsh truth that if something happens & it is not shared, no one might know it has occurred.
Using the examples given in this text, a reader will note that Natalie first had the opportunity to tell her parents that her cousin had video footage of a man standing outside a school yard. Described as a creep, Jack O’Dander—the man of the children’s freakish lore—would, if seen, kidnap the child in question & do terrible things. The catch is that not all children can see Jack.
A silly aspect that one might appreciate is the ghoulish trick that Isobel plays on Natalie, making it seem that neither she nor their cousin can see Jack in the video, which would make no sense given they had the video & were giggling over showing it to Natalie to insight terror in her wee heart. Certainly, I can appreciate that I am an adult & therefore the logic of the situation is perhaps more apparent to me than it was to Natalie. Yet, what matters here is not that she could not decipher the lie but that the environment of her youth was primed for her to believe whatever she was told, & to take it to heart.
Had Natalie been raised in a home where her parents trusted her, had faith in her person, & cared for her so that she felt comfort & love, her decision to smash the cellphone out of fear would have been explained to her parents. This would have meant that she had open communication with people whom she knew she could trust.
The reality is that Natalie could not trust her parents because they did not trust her; she did not factor into their lives more than acknowledging that she existed in some facet. Rather than view the events of the kidnapping with a looming lens riddled with fear, I found the logistics of Natalie & Isobel’s life deeply sad. Has their parents had paid any genuine attention to them, they would have been better prepared for what to do in this type of situation.
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You may feel I have taken an extreme stance, but the world is an extreme & complicated place. It is not outside the realm of reality for a parent to explain to their children why one must stay close when walking in a crowd or why one should not follow a stranger simply because they smiled. Observing the world around them did not factor into the lives of the characters. Therefore, whether Natalie pointed at her sister to be kidnapped in her place, or whether this is compounded guilt at being awake when a strange man came into their room, the reality is that Natalie was left alone to deal with her trauma while her parents went their separate ways.
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I think it is important to pause here to note that the circumstances of the kidnapping do not necessarily align with reality. Surely I can acknowledge that the author might have written the story with an air of magic or absurdity, so that the crux of the events focused on Jack O’Dander & the possibility that the scary children’s story was in fact real.
However, this again does not make sense. Seldom are kidnappings a random occurrence. The man who entered the room would have been plotting this occasion & would have settled on which child would be easier to take. It would not have mattered whether Natalie was awake or not; she was no bigger than a pea, & her parents were nowhere to be seen. Both children were easy targets because they were children.
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The story highlights that it needs a bit of an edge & introduces a male love interest in Dan. Whether Dan is meant to represent Jack O’Dander or whether he is one of Jack’s kidnapping victims or perhaps even just a lunatic of a man who feeds on the trauma of women, the story does not clarify.
This did not so much bother me as leave me feeling like I wasted my time. While Natalie was pouring her heart out to a man she did not know, her sister, Isobel, had returned to her parents & was back on the normal flow of life in Britain. Welcome as this news was, Natalie remains shadowed by her inability to be grown; flouncing between worry that Isobel will know she is responsible for the kidnapping & terror that she will retaliate.
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Once again, a reader must decide whether they wish to wander in the land of make-believe with Natalie. Isobel makes it seem as though Jack O’Dander—whoever kidnapped her—told her that Natalie was the reason she was taken. Ironic that this man failed to note that he, as a grown, perverted man, was the actual reason a child was kidnapped, but on this, I digress.
Rather, Isobel’s entry to the story highlights a return to intergenerational trauma that each of the women feels in their hearts. In explaining the nature of her life, Isobel hints that she had to adapt to horrors in order to survive. Yet, she also makes it seem as though the life that Natalie leads is threatened. Natalie is an adult. What could be done from childhood to adulthood that would cause them so much fear?
I do not ask this in earnest. The story concludes with Dan standing outside Natalie’s window, similarly to Jack O’Dander in the video from her youth. Isobel whispers in the background that she has become the madness that took her. This ambiguous ending to a stunted flow of a story is unfulfilling.
Isobel is said to have remained in Spain for the decade or more that she was missing while Natalie wandered into group talk-therapy with people whom she never endeavoured to know. That is not to say that I can fault either of them for the life they led & the cards they were dealt. However, I wonder what aspect of the story is meant to stick with a reader. What is the moral of the story? Is a reader meant to care about something that is given to them in so little detail?
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Ultimately, I did not hate this story, but it is not one I would recommend to others. The flow works well for what it has attempted to achieve, namely, the introduction of trauma on a family & the dynamic through which it wreaked its havoc in the lives of each of the members.
I feel sadness for Natalie & Isobel having been raised in a home by a mother who faulted them for existing, curiously, & young as children in her life; & by a father who never really tried to make a tangible difference in their lives so that they may turn out different from their mother.
If you would like to read this story, please visit this link — « Jack O’Dander » by Priya Sharma
C. 💌