Dark Gray

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. Shes forgotten her mother and her notorious abductee father Deems has vanished--again. Dark Gray is Rosas unreliable memoir of her fathers zany life from his hapless prankster youth in Australia to apotheosis as a UFO guru in the 21st century. Its the story of Rosas 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.That life may simultaneously reduce the living to both laughter and despair is a subject few novelists tackle in one bite. Damien Broderick and Rory Barnes succeed in the near-impossible task. Dark Gray stands as one of the two great realist novels to tackle the notoriously non-realist theme of contact with extraterrestrials. It resides on the same (astral) plane as Alison Luries magisterial Imaginary Friends.... A quite brilliant achievement. --Rosaleen Love author of The Total Devotion MachineFinalist for the Aurealis Award and the Ditmar Award.