True Believer: A Novel

A surreal and subversively funny debut novel about a UFO convention set over three days in Roswell, New Mexico, and the thrall it holds over one young woman who is reexamining her beliefs.

Alison is having an awakening. After leaving her longtime boyfriend and moving across the country to work for a UFO website (despite being a firm nonbeliever), she expected to feel grief. Instead, she’s euphoric, if a little untethered. Giddy in her new solitary New York life, she compulsively fantasizes about every phallic object in her eyeline: strangers on the sidewalk; her married boss, Liam; the occasional letter opener. When she and her coworkers travel to Roswell, New Mexico, for the annual UFO festival, she finds herself unreasonably consumed by thoughts of Derek, the son of an infamous abductee.

As Alison’s flirtation with Derek takes her deeper into the UFO community, she’s unnerved by her growing affection for the strange people she meets, from a man styling himself as a Cowboy Alien Hunter to an abductee who makes surprisingly gorgeous alien sex paintings. When, to get a scoop for her job, she moonlights as an experiencer in a support group run by a New Age guru, she’s surprised at how much sense the program begins to make. Newly porous and reeling from the perspective all this new distance from her old life has given her, Alison increasingly experiences a blurring of the lines between reality and the extraordinary.

Tautly written and charmingly idiosyncratic, True Believer takes a glittering sledgehammer to all our assumptions about faith, memory, violence, sex, and the stories we tell about who we are. It’s a novel about aliens, yes, but also about desire, belief, and the terrible and inevitable pain and beauty of becoming.