(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Key Lime Sky was provide as a preview through NetGalley and is due for release in print and digital formats on 13 August 2024.
It is always impressive to read a book by an author where an audaciously out-there premise is not only brilliantly and fulsomely executed, but infused too with a kind of reality-affecting humanity that makes the novel come vividly alive.
Holding those two elements in tenson is never easy with a tip one way or the other, especially towards the more outlandish aspects of the story, almost nullifying the effectiveness of its narrative companion, but Al Hess, who previously dazzled with World Running Down, manages it with moving aplomb in Key Lime Sky where a pie-eating blogger who’s both non-binary and autistic, is the only person standing between a psychically invasive alien and the end of life as we know it.
Denver Bryant will be the first person to tell you that he – Denver is relaxed about the use of pronouns which are handled with sensitivity and thoughtfulness throughout – is the most unlikeliest of heroes.
While he’s lived in the town of Muddy Gap, Wyoming for a decade, he’s never really been accepted by the vast majority of the townspeople who refer to him, he feels, disparagingly as Professor Pie – his blog and his excursions to taste pies across the country are well known thanks to one (declining) income-generating viral post – and who treat him as some sort of oddity and freak.
That sense of ease – even laced with he always-underlying trepidation that I would misstep in this social dance – was something I hadn’t felt in ages. And having someone who was safe, who didn’t judge me for being myself, was the sexist thing I could think of. [Quote drawn from a preview copy so may change in the final version.]
In some ways, that doesn’t bother Denver who is happiest at home with his weighted blanket, his fish and his passion for pies, but in other ways, how could it not as he wonders why no one takes the time to understand that because of his autism, he’s not as able to read social situations as neurotypical people routinely do and thus, makes what are perceived as rude and confrontationally honest statements.
Denver’s heart is in the right place, and while he often doesn’t know how to express that, the fact is that he wants to connect and know people and for people to understand that what he says, rather badly, is said out of a genuine desire to help people.
The only person who seems to actually get him is handsome bi bartender Ezra who, after a somewhat messy and wires-crossed meet-cute outside of the town’s post office, connects with Denver in some fairly profound and increasingly romantic ways, just in time to investigate a burst of destructively bright light in the night sky that only they, and some people out of Muddy Gap at the time, recall seeing happen.
That unmissable light show presages an alien incursion which begins to make people act very strangely in a strangely altered landscape of vividly-coloured sand and shell-shaped crab eggs before they begin disappearing in ways that unnerve everyone and defy any sort of ready explanation.
(courtesy official author site)
So, there you have the fantastically out-there premise laid out in all its oddly enthralling glory.
The key to the appeal and success of Key Lime Sky is that Hess not only delivers expansively and with some impressively detailed world-building on the idea of an alien slipping onto earth and altering the very nature and form of reality itself, but that he invests it with the sort of relational intimacy and found-family connectivity that turns a race to save the world into something that also immensely and wonderfully moving.
That’s quite a feat to pull off when so much is happening from the town disappearing into itself as the landscape reorients itself in something not that far from an Escher print-meets-Alice in Wonderland to people falling into folds in reality, but Hess does it masterfully and consistently well in an apocalyptic tale in which, if Denver, Ezra and their other new friends, Trevor and transgender woman Taisha can stop Muddy Gap from being consumed, then the world disappeared altogether.
In a novel that is gloriously and welcomingly queer with people who see and accept and, crucially, love others just as they are – one of the loveliest aspects of the story, beside Denver and Ezra’s love story is the connection that unexpectedly and beautifully forms between Trevor and Taisha – we are not only treated to the bigness of an alien invasion but to the affecting smallness (though it’s not really small at all for the people involved) of people meeting, getting to know and bonding to one another in very unusual circumstances.
‘It’s right!’ I bounced on the balls of my feet, then attacked Ezra in a hug. He laughed and squeezed me back. ‘We’re not going to die. We’ll be able to leave this dreadful town, go on dates, and I can visit my aunt and uncle …’ This wasn’t over yet, though. We had to kill the Dreamer. [Quote drawn from a preview copy so may change in the final version.]
It’s a wonderful ride and at no point does Key Lime Sky falter and lose that tension between the epic and intimate with the connection particularly between Denver and Ezra bringing so much affecting humanity to a story that might otherwise have just been all kinds of alien invasive weirdness.
The centre of the narrative always in Key Lime Sky is Denver, who may not get social cues and who may often prefer to read books than engage with humanity because it’s just too damn difficult, but who is smart and intuitive enough to know what needs to be done to end the threat of all threats to not only his pie-loving life but that of people close, and not so close to him, none of whom deserve to be wiped from the face of existence.
While the townspeople may not love Denver, you will because he is honest and thoughtful and kind and determined, making him exactly the kind of protagonist you want in a story like this, someone who softens the edges of the skillfully-executed action and brings it all together in a way that really impacts you.
One thing Key Lime Sky will do is make you very hungry for dessert so make sure you have some on hand, but what it also non-calorically does is take you into a world which is being awfully transformed by an alien invasion but which fights to save itself in the form of Denver Bryant, powered by the tenacious belief that life and connection and queerness and humanity all matter and are worth fighting for with everything you have in your arsenal.
Because who doesn’t want to live, and love to eat pie another day?