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, sent by Brigham Young to mine silver.” Habermeyer, it turns out, has fortuitously “discovered” in his attic nearly a thousand obituaries his father had written for the Calypsee newspaper. In the ninety-five examples that he has selected for Necronauts, he transports us back to the 1980s of Ronald Reagan and the nascent years of our nation’s journey into Christian fundamentalism. Rumors and outright lies are becoming much more appealing than facts. Calypsee is better known for having manufactured a mildly radioactive green glass that collectors crave, which might be one of the reasons why the locals die such strange deaths. The town once had a crematorium with peephole windows in the furnace “so grieving families could watch the process” of their loved ones going up in flames. But it closed after mismanagement, then quickly reopened as a pizzeria. It’s that kind of town.

Wikipedia tells us that a necronaut “is a term derived from the Greek words nekros (νεκρός), meaning “corpse” or “dead”, and nautes (ναύτης), meaning “sailor”. There is definitely something alien about the way the inhabitants of Calypsee sail to or through death. There is the grocer found dead after “an erotic game gone wrong with his mistress, a synthetic doll.” Or there is the woman who worked days cleaning motel rooms and nights at the gas station. Although she was convinced that her son, a “test tube baby,” was the next Messiah, he was nevertheless hit by a cement truck, thus becoming only “a blob on the road like a gobstopper that had been licked one too many times.” There is the ex-blackjack dealer who became “God’s postman, because his brain acted “like a strange radio transmitting frequencies to heaven.” At the local playground, he told the cosmonaut boy who was playing in the rocket ship: “This is Utah, prayer is our drug of choice.” And then there is the septic man, whose wife went out to buy milk and diapers and didn’t return. She had to be a Russian spy, he told everyone. At times he “considered there was something the matter with his head filled with so many thoughts, as if God were whispering in his ear, but he couldn’t quite say what, or maybe words words were just an undiscovered variation of diarrhea.”

Habermeyer has illustrated these sometimes charming, sometimes alarming, but always off-kilter obituaries with a matching set of portrait photographs from his own extraordinary collection of vernacular photographs. Some show people whose faces has been scratched out (perhaps by the author?), and many are photographs which would normally be considered rejects or accidents of one form or another. They have been overexposed, double-exposed, poorly photographed, or badly processed in ways that lend the photographs eerie, other-worldly auras which suggest we are observing the very moment in which death envelopes Calypsee’s eccentric characters.

Understandably, Necronauts has been compared to a “Spoon River Anthology [that] had been written by David Lynch” (Brian Evenson) and to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (Chris Bachelder), two books that tell the stories of the residents of small American towns. To these examples, I would add Michael Lesy’s obsessed 1973 cult book Wisconsin Death Trip (it has been reprinted twice since). Wikipedia’s description of Lesy’s book is hard to beat. “It charts numerous sordid, tragic, and bizarre incidents that took place in and around Jackson County, Wisconsin between 1885 and 1900, primarily in the town of Black River Falls. The events are outlined through actual written historical documents, primarily articles published in the town newspaper . . . accompanied by contemporaneous photographs and portraits taken in Black River Falls by photographer Charles Van Schaick. Thematically, the book emphasizes the harsh aspects of Midwestern rural life under the pressures of crime, pestilence, mental illness, and urbanization.”

Necronauts (Stillhouse Press, 2026) is a weird, funny, heartbreaking novel that is a brilliant example in which the text and the accompanying photographs do each other justice. Both take on serious forms, in obituaries and in death-haunted photographs, yet both are handled tongue-in-cheek. Life and death in Calypsee, Utah, managed to foreshadow the absurd and frightening America we live in today.