After the Saucers Landed - Douglas Lain

The bastard-offspring of They Live and The Day the Earth Stood Still, as told by Jean Paul Sartre.

Shape-changing aliens may have landed on the White House lawn and subsequently integrated into human society, but humanity is still full of self-centered and self-absorbed individuals. Laura’s just scraping by on her art teacher’s salary. Donald, a bestselling author and UFOlogist who provided counseling to abductees, has tried to distance himself from the saucer landings and is looking to move on with his life.

But everything changes when Shelly, an alien enrolled in Laura’s art class, mysteriously switches places with Laura. Life begins to unravel. Laura then realizes this isn’t the first time Shelly has moved into another person’s body, and fragments of other people’s memories have jumped with her, including those of Donald’s wife. Laura begins to grasp that reality, or at least humanity’s perception of it, may be more flexible than anyone wants to admit. And though she can’t explain how or why, she suspects the aliens are behind it and will need Donald’s help to stop them.

In an egocentric society that sleepwalks through the rituals of daily life, would people even notice if the world around them suddenly and inexplicably changes? Part Jonathan Lethem (Amnesia Moon) and part Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five), Douglas Lain’s latest novel uses science fiction’s alien invasion rubric to examine and undermine the world we take for granted. This deeply unsettling satire places him alongside contemporaries like Jeff VanderMeer and Charles Yu as one of his generation’s most exciting and challenging speculative fiction voices.

PRAISE
“Douglas Lain has a great brain. I am hugely impressed with his prospects to be a completely uncommercial genius. God help him.”
—Jonathan Lethem, New York Times-bestselling author

“Lain’s writing is unsettling, ferociously smart, and extremely addictive.”
—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble and Magic for Beginners

“Straight out of the Pamela Zoline era of New Wave fiction, with a strong dose of nuclear paranoia and Reagan-era ‘kill a Commie for mommy’ reverse-nostalgia, Lain writes from the conscience.”
—Jay Lake, author of Manspring and Rocket Science

“I don’t know anyone else doing quite what Lain is doing; fascinating work, moving, strikingly honest, powerful.”
—Locus

“An intellect and a questioner of literary forms, Lain is also a husbanding, fathering advocate for the Everyman in us all. The result is curiously human and intimate—down to earth, even as the universe falls apart in our hands.”
—Kris Saknussemm, author of Zanesville and Enigmatic Pilot

“To find oneself alternately pondering the metafictional importance of a Sesame Street book and choking back the tears induced by a surprisingly human drama is a testament to Lain’s writing. I loved every sentence, every word.”
—J. David Osborne, author of By the Time We Leave Here, We’ll Be Friends, on Wave of Mutilation

“Lain proves himself adept at dramatizing such decidedly non-whimsical matters as autism, parent-child estrangement, and the quest for individual identity amidst political upheaval.”
—James Morrow, author of The Last Witchfinder and Towing Jehovah

“Billy Moon is postmodern SF, powering past mere science and into a cubist world of strange…moving and profound, with a radically evanescent style. Just the thing for our new century.”
—Rudy Rucker, author of the WARE Tetralogy