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A conversation with author Dave Housley about his new science fiction novel, Aliens Attack!
Website
housleydave.com
Instagram
@dave.housley
Facebook
@dave.housley
About Aliens Attack!
Told through the men and women—and aliens—who experienced it firsthand, Dave Housley’s sci-fi novel Aliens Attack! presses us with the big question: what would you do at the end of the world?
Intertwining the depth of sonder with the honesty of reality, Housley brings us the truth of what an alien invasion would look like in each of our lives. From a woman who realizes the man she’s about to marry has a dark secret to a priest addicted to oxycontin holed up with a choir he despises, Aliens Attack! is pockmarked with wry humour, pop culture references, and authenticity.
Housley holds the mirror up for us and tells us to behold what we cannot run away from—ourselves.
Praise for Aliens Attack
“This book won’t just break your heart. It will burn it, blow it up, zap it like the titular aliens attacking. It happened to me – but I’ve also never been more grateful to an author for introducing me to characters—aliens, dads, clergymen, kids—who in the midst of crisis behave in such a poignantly, perfect human way that I’m still thinking about them, long after leaving them back on that burned out earth.” —Amber Sparks, author of Happy People Don’t Live Here
“Dave Housley is one of my favorite writers, in general, and almost certainly my favorite within the genre of the Dumb Idea™ (complimentary). By which I mean taking a premise that is on its surface too silly, or one-note, or gimmicky for Literature, and infusing it with humanity—the beauty and complications and bullshit and warmth and everything else that makes up being a real person in this world. In Aliens Attack!, Housley turns those talents toward perhaps the very Dumb Idea™ he was most meant to write, and the result is everything I could have wanted it to be and more.” —Aaron Burch, author of A Kind of In Between, and Year of the Buffalo
“When the shit hits the fan, you’ll still be you and what about that? Aliens Attack! is an existential coming-of-age, the truest, realist thing I’ve read in a hundred years. It should be terrifying but I found it to be enormously comforting. I don’t know why. Worthy of mention in the same breath as Ursula Le Guin but better because it’s an expression of the keen, funny, perceptive mind of Your Friend Dave.” —Laura Scalzo, author of American Arcadia
“What would you do—really do—in an emergency of planetary proportions? How capable, ethical, and heroic would you be? In this novel about an alien invasion of earth, Housley smuggles uneasy questions like this into our brains with wry humor and cleverly intertwining narratives. Multiple perspectives from both sides of the invasion equation show us calamity from the perspectives of everyday people (and aliens) who are vulnerable, fallible, and feel refreshingly real, reflecting ourselves back to ourselves.” —Tara Campbell, author of City of Dancing Gargoyles and TreeVolution
About Dave Housley
Dave Housley is the author of four other novels and five story collections, most recently The Other Ones, Looney, The Greys (with Becky Barnard), and Massive Cleansing Fire.
He is one of the founding editors of the literary organization Barrelhouse, and the primary organizer of the Barrelhouse conference, Conversations and Connections: Practical Advice on Writing. He is the Director of Web Strategy for Penn State Online Education.
He lives in State College, PA, with his wife Lori and son Ben. He wants to believe.
