ABOUT NECRONAUTS

A DARK AND POIGNANT ODYSSEY AT THE CROSSROADS OF 
BELIEF, FAMILY, AND THE AMERICAN DREAM 

Calypsee, Utah: a small fundamentalist town at the edge of nowhere whose patron saint is Ronald Reagan and whose motto is In Armageddon We Trust. Among its misfits, perverts, and prophets lives a boy wearing a cosmonaut helmet—or maybe it’s just an old fishbowl—who wants more than anything to launch himself into outer space.  

Written in the form of ninety-five newspaper obituaries and interspersed with vernacular photography, Necronauts is a loosely reimagined Pinocchio tale and ode to campy old sci-fi films. By turns philosophical and whimsical, savage and sentimental, Ryan Habermeyer’s funhouse ride through the American West is also an intimate portrait of fathers and sons and a searing satire of 1980s Americana—where addictive religious paranoia and suspect science blur into a quixotic fever dream full of reckless fantasy.  

PRAISE FOR NECRONAUTS

"I loved this novel for the ways it captured a small town through obituaries (obits unlike those published in any small-town newspaper because they are obituaries of revelations, of story, not a listing of facts). And then those obituaries work in conversation with vintage photos that hang over the stories spectrally. This novel is a gritty, elegiac fever dream of the American West that explores the strange intersections of belief, addiction, and masculinity."
– Grant Faulkner, author of All the Comfort Sin Can Provide

“Ryan Habermeyer makes of Calypsee, Utah a kind of Winesburg of the West, inhabited by doomed and lonely believers. Necronauts is obsessed with death but brimming with vivid and excessive life, strange but credible. The book is a marvel of form and voice, its effects far more glorious than gloomy.”
– Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special

“Necronauts is something special: a novel in miniatures whose concerns are so large it feels almost cosmic. If you were to trace its family tree looking for ancestors, you might find Invisible Cities along one branch and Spoon River Anthology along another, with W. G. Sebald and Jeff VanderMeer among its nearby cousins. Ultimately, though, it's a book that transcends its heritage. Through its strange, barbed, wistful catalogue of uncanny recovered obituaries, it introduces us to a town full of people who, as the author might put it, "feel the holes in their hearts swallowing their hearts." So, I confess, do I. And so, I bet, do you.”
– Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ryan Habermeyer is the author of the short story collections Salt Folk and The Science of Lost Futures. His award-winning stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, Massachusetts Review, DIAGRAM and others. A Fulbright Scholar who has lived, studied, and taught in Poland, Scotland, Spain, and Mexico, he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Salisbury University in Maryland.