Ryan Habermeyer’s “Necronauts”

“It is with sadness that we communicate the passing of the street sweeper, a curious man who came home from the war with a scar above his ear shaped like a pretzel. There was talk he had one of those Japanese microchips in his brain . . . On the weekends he set up a kiosk at the mall recruiting for the Army. The cosmonaut boy, fresh off a bump of Special K, listened as the street sweeper told stories of what was happening in Grenada and Beirut. Rolling out a constellation map, he showed the crowd of boys the galaxy clusters already being partitioned between Russian and the USA. World War Three will be fought in outer space. Nobody will hear the screams, he said. Everyone signed the dotted line.” In his first novel (after two books of short stories) Ryan Habermeyer’s Necronauts uses the fiction genre of the “found manuscript” to create a group portrait of a mythical Utah town. “Calypsee rarely appears on maps. It was founded by nine polygamist families of Swedes and Germans in 1857,…