Fantastic Books has recently published Dark Gray by Damien Broderick and Rory Barnes. Originally published (but only in Australia) in 1997 as The Book of Revelation, this enhanced edition, subtitled “A Novel of Abduction”, includes new afterwords by the authors. The novel was a finalist for both the Aurealis and the Ditmar Awards.
The authors offer the following description of the story:
My father is the Rev. Daimon Keith. At the age of twenty, he was abducted near a school playground by small gray aliens. Indeed, Daimon was taken up into UFOs not just that once, but from infancy, and over and again. It caused him to devote his middle years to the establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ, Time Traveler, and later Scionetics.
Rosa “Flake” Rosch is a postmodern orphan. She’s forgotten her mother, and her notorious abductee father Deems has vanished—again. Dark Gray is Rosa’s unreliable memoir of her father’s zany life, from his hapless prankster youth in Australia to apotheosis as a UFO guru in the 21st century. It’s the story of Rosa’s indomitable mother, her weird quasi-brother Ben, Zelda the horsewife, and our whole tormented era, as we blast into hyperreality.
Tilted on the hard slab, he knows the heavy stink of the place. What awful crap do they suck up with those lipless little mouths? The gray doctor touches his forehead with a needle—sharp, glinting—and pushes it hard into his skull.
SFScope Editor Ian Randal Strock is the publisher of Fantastic Books.