Small Altars by Justin Gardiner Review by Amilya Robinson

Small Altars by Justin Gardiner

Review by Amilya Robinson

Publisher: Tupelo Press

Publication Date: 04/03/24

ISBN-13: 978-1-961209-06-0

Pages: 67

In the Shadow of Heroes: A Review of Justin Gardiner’s Small Altars

Naming the Lifeboat and Beneath the Shadow author Justin Gardiner returns with a poignant, vulnerably authentic, and subtly humorous long-form lyric essay, Small Altars. The heartfelt nonfiction essay weaves a narrative of superhero grandeur with the tragic, short life of the author’s older brother, Aaron. Struggling with mental illness and other ailments, Aaron finds solace from the world in comics, fantasy, and the like as his ark amongst the storm. But his life is far from miraculous, far from the glory of Hollywood heroes. Gardiner takes us on a journey through childhood in which his and Aaron’s love for the heroic and fantastical grows, through adulthood when Gardiner seeks to rediscover his identity outside of his relationship with his brother, and finally through the delicate web of memories woven around Aaron’s inexorable passing. 

Grief and tragedy are a few of those universal connective tissues written into the script of our being. Small Altars invites you to embrace those connections, to reach into the intimacy of another’s life and hold it close for yourself. Adding in a few tidbits about recognizable pop culture figures doesn’t hurt, either. “They say his character was modeled after Howard Hughes, without the crippling neurosis,” Gardiner writes about Iron Man, “Telling, which plotlines we remain true to, which details we add and subtract, what we choose to replace.” The allure of a familiar name, a superhero’s name, draws you into Gardiner’s enchanting narrative. But unlike mainstream media, Gardiner has no qualms about revealing uncomfortable truths at the heart of what a superhero is or was made to be. This novel is, at its core, an exploration of grief, family, and art. But to confine it exclusively to that would be to ignore the commentary Gardiner weaves in throughout the story. In Small Altars, there exists a sharp, condemning critique of the entertainment industry and of the stories we idolize as a society. Alongside sorting through the complexity of familial relationships and shifting mental health, Gardiner seamlessly intertwines broader conversations about the fantastical structure that absorbed his brother’s life. 

There is a purposeful irony in running a parallel of superhero origin stories with that of the author’s brother. I appreciate the austerity in it, the unfaltering sting of reality. It’s a bleak contrast, and yet I think it tells us much about Aaron and about Gardiner as an author daring and genuine enough to employ it. After recalling his brother’s bereft rise to adulthood, Gardiner tells us, “If this were a Hollywood movie, or even a decent comic book, we could expect, here, a turning: Then one day it happened, and he became… But in the theater of his life, my brother was only ever cast to play himself. Minor role, thankless task. And so, after a few years where he had kept things mostly together, he contracted a rare form of cancer, and three years later—at the age of forty-four—he died.”  If we place Gardiner’s brother alongside the cast of heroes, his story would be like if Tony Stark took some shrapnel to the chest, Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed, or Wade Wilson developed terminal cancer…but that’s all that happened. The heroes never get their powers (or supersuits…or super gadgets), never get to enact revenge or go on journeys of moral and personal growth. They stagger through these life-altering events, with nothing remotely “super” to come of it—an origin story where the protagonist misses his chance to be bitten by the radioactive spider or discover his hidden identity as a mind-reading Martian. It leaves one feeling jipped, as if Aaron’s story was unfinished, still waiting for the other half of a story that will never be written. One might look through the narrow window into Aaron’s life that we’ve been given and conclude that it lacked the “super” or superhuman qualities required for a superhero origin story. If you consider beyond that limited frame, you might instead conclude that it is the superhero stories that lack a foundation in reality, in the remotely possible. But I suppose that’s why superhero stories are written the way they are, why we are drawn to them the way we are: because of the allure of believing in something grander than our mere existence, which we have been convinced is unremarkable.

Like his brother, Gardiner himself does not escape scrutinous examination, facing side-by-side comparisons with the best and bravest. “In the old DC and Marvel comic books, the heroes are always being forced to choose,” Gardiner explains, “A city bus, for instance, full of helpless New Yorkers, teetering on the edge of a blown-out bridge, or else a serial love interest and—semblance of a normal life—in trouble somehow, screaming his name…Only if you are Clark Kent or Tony Stark, or even Peter Parker, the right choice is always both—save everyone.” Reality, as we know, is much more complicated. “’You’ve got to promise us,’” Gardiner’s mother reiterates after insisting that he not return to take care of his brother upon their passing, “’We’ve made arrangements,’ our father adds. ‘He’ll be taken care of.’ I had watched such scenes play out before. I knew all my lines. I weighed all the costs. I promised.” I expected to feel disappointment at this revelation, this resignation of fate. Instead, I related deeply to the torturous mix of a driving moral responsibility and the desire to prioritize one’s own health and well-being. In trying to compare ourselves to these fictional, perfected beings who make all the right choices, or at least get to expect a happy ending when they don’t, we only serve to injure ourselves. It’s deeply ironic that we create these very idols and yet cannot possibly measure up to them, try as we might. Does it make us—Gardiner—terrible people? Or are we just human? Humans who continue to manufacture and succumb to our very own kryptonite. 

Aaron’s death and the moments that follow it are reminiscent of the same feelings one gets at the climax of a movie, a rubber band pulling tighter and tighter all the time until, finally, it snaps. You know it’s coming, and you’re anticipating it, but it still shocks you a bit when it finally does. After he passes, Gardiner reflects on his brother, “the near constant companion of [his] youth,” who he saw as “a lonely and awkward teenager,”, and “a broken and scared young man” but continues to develop the image of who he was, offering that “perhaps [his] brother didn’t need a time machine to salvage something from his life. Perhaps what he needed was what we all need: the chance to work through the strange and confusing phases of who we are.” Possibly the most compelling aspect of Gardiner’s work in Small Altars is not his deft ability to knit together reality with fantasy or even his ability to crack open the walls we’ve built inside ourselves, but his willingness to grow. Watching as Gardiner opens up the world of possibilities in which Aaron lived instead of confining his life and his memory to a narrow view is magnificent to behold. He has unraveled that perception to allow space for the possibility that his brother may have seen things differently and might have been capable of more than anyone ever gave him credit for. A window to the human consciousness—to the most fragile parts of our minds influenced by grief, guilt, love, and acceptance—Small Altars transcends the common narratives surrounding death, the people who are left behind in its wake, and the things we use to light the way through the darkness. 

Justin Gardiner is the author of three books–the long-form lyric essay Small Altars, winner of a Faulkner-Wisdom Nonfiction Book Award and published by Tupelo Press in 2024; Beneath the Shadow: Legacy and Longing in the Antarctic, published as part of the Crux Literary Nonfiction Series by the University of Georgia Press; and the poetry collection Naming the Lifeboat from Main Street Rag. His essays and poems have appeared in journals that include The Missouri Review, Blackbird, Quarterly West, Zone 3, and Catamaran. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and serves as the Nonfiction Editor of The Southern Humanities Review. 

Amilya Robinson is a graduate student at Simmons University in Boston pursuing her M.A. in Children’s Literature and her M.F.A. in Writing for Children. She recently graduated from San Diego State University with a bachelor’s degree in English as well as certificates in Children’s Literature and Creative Editing & Publishing. Amilya has experience TA-ing for writing courses, writing creatively for SDSU’s first all-women-run magazine, Femininomenon, and editing for Splice, The Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship at SDSU College of Arts and Letters. 

10 September 2025