Necronauts

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.