A woman adrift finds timid faith in flying saucers and unfathomable encounters in this enthralling literary fiction.
Joan wants to leave the past behind. With a recent history too unbearable to recollect, she focuses instead on an unexpected opportunity to make a new life for herself. A life that will soon be brimming with deep curiosities, both spiritual and supernatural.
1947 California. When Joan’s bus is stalled by the delivery of a giant telescope lens to a nearby observatory, Joan stumbles upon a curious cafe selling a booklet on “The Possibility of Life on Other Planets.” As a novice flying saucer enthusiast, Joan is drawn immediately to this book, written by the cafe’s cook, George. With the book in her hand and an uncertain future ahead of her, Joan is quick to inquire about the cafe’s help-wanted sign. With room and board included, Joan is hired immediately, as if delivered by fate to Palomar Gardens.
As Joan settles into her new life, she grows closer to her fellow commune residents and coworkers, George, Alice, and Lucy. George, referred to by Alice and Lucy as “The Professor,” has a certain mysticism about him and an effortless, alluring sort of wisdom. Alice and Lucy appear to be his faithful followers, appreciating his ideas on the spiritual world and the universe.
When Joan confesses her interest in flying saucers to George, the two quickly bond over their shared mesmerization in seeking answers to the unknown: saucers for Joan and spirituality for George. Over time, Joan and George’s worlds are entangled. George becomes obsessed with documenting flying saucers, and Joan becomes enamored by the faith she finds in George’s ideas and discoveries.
Helium follows Joan as she attempts to trade her painful past for newfound faith in the impossible.This novel thrusts you into an unsettling world that will leave you questioning what is real, what is impossible, and who you can trust.
“The telescope helped astronomers see, but it probably blinded them, too. Look too long through a tube at the universe, and you lose your perspective. Maybe there are things you’re not meant to see that way. Maybe it takes an amateur to look with new eyes.”
Helium has a gravitational pull, luring you into its orbit that’s riddled with impossibilities. It keeps you close with its peculiar, flying saucer-obsessed characters, its collection of universal and personal uncertainties, and all-around uneasy mysteriousness. Author Dave Kenneycarries you through the story slowly, letting you build in anticipation of when you will drop and find solid ground again. And just like Joan’s own journey, the reader must have faith that the story will bring them exactly where they need to go. They will see clearly if they hold out just a little bit longer.
The late 40s to mid-50s timeline adds a certain charm to the delightfully kitschy world of flying saucers. It’s a combination of time and community that is rough around the edges, populated with polite oddballs and gullible dreamers, making for a world that’s worth meandering in.
It’s wonderfully unexpected that a book so taken with flying saucers and alien contact would be so literary, yet Helium effortlessly melds the genres of sci-fi, historical fiction, and literary fiction together. Helium highlights the humanity in the universe’s uncertainty and, in seamless prose, depicts the messy truth of faith and hope. This is the kind of book you devour to quench your ever-growing, cultish, out-of-this-world curiosity.
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