“Necronauts is something special: a novel in miniatures whose concerns are so large it feels almost cosmic. If you were to trace its family tree looking for ancestors, you might find Invisible Cities along one branch and Spoon River Anthology along another, with W. G. Sebald and Jeff VanderMeer among its nearby cousins. Ultimately, though, it's a book that transcends its heritage. Through its strange, barbed, wistful catalogue of uncanny recovered obituaries, it introduces us to a town full of people who, as the author might put it, "feel the holes in their hearts swallowing their hearts." So, I confess, do I. And so, I bet, do you.”—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations Calypsee, Utah: a small fundamentalist town at the edge of nowhere whose patron saint is Ronald Reagan and whose motto is In Armageddon We Trust. Among its misfits, perverts, and prophets lives a boy wearing a cosmonaut helmet—or maybe it’s just an old fishbowl—who wants more than anything to launch himself into outer space. Written in the form of ninety-five newspaper obituaries and interspersed with vernacular photography, Necronauts is a loosely reimagined Pinocchio tale and ode to campy old sci-fi films. By turns philosophical and whimsical, savage and sentimental, Ryan Habermeyer’s funhouse ride through the American West is also an intimate portrait of fathers and sons and a searing satire of 1980s Americana—where addictive religious paranoia and suspect science blur into a quixotic fever dream full of reckless fantasy.