Review : Necronauts by Ryan Habermeyer

It is with sadness we communicate the finishing of Ryan Habermeyer’s newest book, Necronauts (Stillhouse Press), and with it the termination of inhabiting Calypsee. Calypsee, a small town somewhere in the Escalante Desert of Utah, is a surreal world filled with many strange residents.  Necronauts takes the form of obituaries for the townspeople, and we learn from the obituaries that these people are prone to killing themselves, each other, or otherwise dying strange deaths. The obituaries are accompanied by spectral black and white photos of people, and the juxtaposition of the photos to the obituaries invites the reader to think about the relations between them.

Most interesting is the continual presence of the supposedly alien boy named Nobody, and the ex-Mormon dentist. Nobody is always wearing a cosmonaut helmet and speaks with his fingers. The dentist watches over Nobody as a “parental figure”. They are both existentially lost travelers in this cosmic landscape, separate from the dominate faith and worldview of the other townspeople. Throughout the book their presence acts as the throughline for the novel, tying the obituaries together. The obituaries function as a backdrop for understanding the town of Calypsee and show how living in such a town affects the residents within. Necronauts is a triumph of form, with many of the obituaries being able to function as a stand alone pieces while also working together to form a cohesive whole.

Within Necronauts you will find plenty of references in regard to old sci-fi movies and Mormon lore to punctuate the heavier aspects of the novel with bright spots of humor. It’s filled with easter eggs of lesser known Mormon beliefs, of which my two favorites are bigfoot actually being a still wandering Cain, and that those who do not enter the highest tier of Mormon heaven lose their genitalia (according to some doctrine). The heavy references to sci-fi B movies are also a perfect complement to the surreal happenings within the town. The difference between what’s believable in the town of Calypsee, as opposed to what’s wholesale believable, starts to give the reader a distinct feeling that Calypsee exists as something close to this world, but still separate from it. Calypsee is a purgatory, where the inhabitants have nothing to do but wander in the desert dust and do what they can to endure.

The underlying narrative of Nobody and the dentist continually centers on the actions used to cope with being stuck in Calypsee, and as the novel unfolds we start to understand Calypsee as a place full of the religiously repressed, a place with little going on and with little to do. This is a place where the dentist feels intense existential strife. This is a place that Nobody is attempting to leave via catapult, in a hope to be picked up by the mothership and taken to his home planet. Drug use abounds. The obituaries, and the story of Nobody and the dentist, focus around a desire to escape. Nobody ever leaves Calypsee. Except, of course, by the final escape of death.

If you wish to purchase Necronauts, click here.

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Ryan Habermeyer is a native of Los Angeles. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. He is the author of the forthcoming novel Necronauts (Stillhouse Press) and the short story collections Salt Folk (Cornerstone Press) and The Science of Lost Futures (BOA Editions). His award-winning stories and essays have been published in such literary journals as Conjunctions, Alaska Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, Cincinnati Review, Puerto del Sol, Flyway, Fairy Tale Review, DIAGRAM, Blackbird, and Cimarron Review. A Fulbright Scholar who has lived, taught and studied in Poland, Scotland, Spain, and Mexico, he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Salisbury University.

Myles Varga is an MFA candidate for fiction at New Mexico State University, where he teaches and serves as the Managing Editor for Puerto Del Sol. He has won first place for the 2024 Kevin Mcilvoy Creative Writing Endowed Fellowship. His work has appeared in Necessary Fiction, Folded Treasures, Organ Mountain Poets Society, and Poets for Science.