Review: Key Lime Sky, by Al Hess

Blurb

An alien invasion hits the town of Muddy Gap, but a disgruntled pie aficionado is the only one who seems to remember it…

Denver Bryant’s passion for pie has sent him across Wyoming in search of the best slices. Though he dutifully posts reviews on his blog, he’s never been able to recreate his brief moment of viral popularity, and its trickling income isn’t enough to pay his rent next month.

Driving home from a roadside diner, Denver witnesses a UFO explode directly over his tiny town of Muddy Gap. When he questions his neighbors, it appears that Denver is the only person to have seen anything – or to care that the residents’ strange behavior, as well as a shower of seashell hail, might be evidence of something extraterrestrial. Being both non-binary and autistic, he’s convinced his reputation as the town eccentric is impeding his quest for answers. Frustrated, he documents the bizarre incidents on his failing pie blog, and his online popularity skyrockets. His readers want the truth, spurring him to get to the bottom of things.

The only person in town who takes him seriously is handsome bartender, Ezra. As the two investigate over pie and the possibility of romance, the alien presence does more than change the weather. People start disappearing. When Denver and Ezra make a run for it, the town refuses to let them leave. Reality is folding in on itself. It’s suddenly a race against time to find the extraterrestrial source and destroy it before it consumes not only Muddy Gap but everything beyond. Denver’s always been more outsider than hero, but he’s determined to ensure that a world with Ezra – and with pie – still exists tomorrow.

Key Lime Sky is the second book from AL Hess at Angry Robot – check out his previous work, World Running Down.

https://angryrobotbooks.my.canva.site/key-lime-sky

Al Hess is also a fantastic artist – check out his instagram!

My Review

Thanks to Caroline at Angry Robot for my copy of this book and for the blog tour.

5 stars. No notes.

Denver Bryant has lived in the town of Muddy Gap, Wyoming for a decade, and loves pie. Xe make a living, just, from critiquing pies. Xyr autistic, non-binary, and, have a complicated family life. Which xyr running away from by staying in Muddy Gap and refusing visitors. They feel unwelcome in the town, where xyr known as ‘Professor Pie’.

One night, returning from a visit to a diner to taste the pie, they see a green light in the sky over Muddy Gap. When they return home, weird things start happening. No-one else seems to have seen the green light, large hail falls from the sky but doesn’t melt, and xe bump into a beautiful man.

Denver falls in love, fights aliens and makes friends. There are weird crab things, random appearing sand dunes and oceans, roads that never end and building falling out of the sky.

No explosions though.

I enjoyed the characterisation of Muddy Gap, a small town with big ambitions, the people who live there and the way Denver views them changing over the course of the novel. I found the slow collecting of characters, who are not what Denver initially expects them to be, and the development of each, to be heart-warming. The group survive together, and grow together as they realise they’re going to survive. Even prepper Molly comes out of it a better person in the end.

I enjoyed the description of Denver burrowing through and thrashing around in the Dreamer, fighting against memories and fears to save the world. It was visceral. And there was a lot of viscera; tuna-scented.

The ‘physics’ Denver and Ezra develop to explain the intrusion of the alien world into Muddy Gap is imaginative and suggests some knowledge on the part of the author. The idea of contact lenses that can interface with the internet, record video and photographs, and send it all to email or a blog, is really cool, and give it 50 years and we might be there. Won’t that be fun?

If the AI and voice-recognition software improves, we might have something fun to play with. Imagine going to an event and being able to record events without getting your phone out, uploading it all to storage immediately, so that we have a record, without the mediation of a camera or phone lens? I enjoy the way Hess takes current technology and tweaks it in realistic ways so that a plausible future technology is imagined. There are still clunky things, like using a phone to record concurrent audio, and the problem of WIFI coverage in rural areas, government hacks and counter-tech to stop their nefarious acts being recorded and published.

Talking of, I love the way Denver stands up to the doctors and soldiers trying to claim the survivors are suffering from a group delusion, and the bluntness xey use as a weapon, as xey challenge the lies, and xyr willingness to potentially embarrass xemself to get the truth out. I

Hess writes autistic characters well, being as he is autistic himself. Like many autistic people, Denver struggles in supermarkets and crowded places, prefers to interact through a computer and struggles with relationships. Xe reacts to people in ways I recognise, assuming, based on personal experience, that everyone hates xym and that xe’ll be rejected by Ezra, as a mistake. This is based on Denver’s life experiences, being rejected repeatedly, and feeling like a burden to family. It colours Denver’s interpretation of events, making neutral and positive interactions automatically negative.

It’s not irrational either; experience has taught autistic people that we will be rejected for being weird, for having strange interests and for not communicating in a socially normative way. Unfortunately, it does mean we let our past experiences overwhelm current experiences, which given the trauma produced by past experiences is perfectly rational. CBT doesn’t work on us because we know our responses are rational. Sometimes, we need someone to explain why they acted the way they did for us to realign things.

This book was a fun read, I strung it out over three weeks, because I couldn’t bare for it to end, as much as I wanted to find out what happened and just how Denver, Ezra, Trevor and Taisha will survive and save the world. I loved the use of social media and near-future technology to record events and the way Denver writes xyr pie reviews. The reviews are so evocative and descriptive, while the tone is just the right side of snarky honesty. I’ll never write such fun reviews; sadly, I’m not as good a writer as Al Hess.

Highly rated for the imaginative story, complex and diverse characters, with good Queer and ND representation.