“Fathers create their sons, but in the end it’s sons who invent their fathers.”

Necronauts is a very Utah book. It’s steeped in Mormonism, far-right conspiracy theories, Jell-O, sugar beets, and other local references. Many chapters are accompanied by a photograph with someone’s face scratched out. Also, there are many fathers who abandon their sons in these pages.

The gimmick of the book is that most of the chapters are supposed to be written in the form of obituaries, although they don’t read like typical obituaries. Usually, there’s mention of a death at the start (most of the deaths don’t occur naturally), then it introduces other topics and meanders in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way. There’s often dark humor.

Chapters often seem unrelated to each other. It’s more like a collection of prose poems or flash fiction at first. Partway through, we do get a couple main characters called the dentist and the cosmonaut boy, who is also known as Nobody. (None of the characters are named.) Nobody never takes off his astronaut helmet and speaks using sign language that others don’t understand. He believes he’s an alien and wants to get back to outer space.

The book makes references to Mormonism that non-Mormons probably won’t get, but it’s also disrespectful to Mormonism, so the book seems to be written for an ex-Mormon audience.

It seems to take place during Reagan’s presidency. We get references to AIDS, the Challenger explosion, and the Hoffman killings, but there are also contemporary references to things like Deseret Nation and soaking, so it kind of takes place in the present day as well.

Lots of unexplained references and non sequiturs makes it feel like it’s written in code at times. It’s occasionally funny (there’s a Christian sex shop that says you can have a second coming using their products), however, it sometimes sexualizes children, which I found icky.