When the aliens finally invade Earth—and there’s a non-zero chance they will—there will be no diplomacy. No peaceful exchange of ideas or technology or resources. Instead, there will be terror and plundering and vaporizing lasers and gigantic ships capable of leveling cities, and this is how the world will end, according to Dave Housley, in his new novel, Aliens Attack!
These moments of reckoning? They come up a lot in Housley’s work. In short story collections like Ryan Seacrest is Famous (Dzanc, 2013), If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home (Dzanc, 2015), and in novels like The Greys (with Becky Barnard, Pandamoon, 2018).
But Housley is also so damn good at helping other writers find their own moments. He’s one of the founders and editors of Barrelhouse, and he organizes both their Conversations & Connections Writer’s Conference and the annual Writer Camps in Pennsylvania. In short, the impact his work has made on the literary community is as big as a full-scale alien invasion, and we’re all the better for it.
We hopped on Zoom in March to talk about UFOs, the essential role of editors, and David Bowie’s teeth.
The Rumpus: Okay, here’s the most important question: What was behind the decision to make the alien spaceships shaped like zeppelins? I mean, this is clearly breaking away from alien spaceship lore. We need some revelations here.
Dave Housley: So in the launch party last night, I had this Penn State professor who has literally written a history of UFOs come in and do a quick, ten-minute presentation on the history of UFO sightings. He mentioned that it all starts with one pilot seeing something and describing it as a “saucer.” The newspapers then took that and transformed it into descriptions of a “flying saucer,” and the professor mentioned that this was where the lore just shot off: with the phrase “flying saucer.” But for what I wanted, I liked the idea of the ships being different and a little steampunk-y. I had this idea that the ships themselves were a little beat up and looked old.
I was thinking about Star Wars, too, which was the first time I ever saw how all these amazing, technological marvels could be beat up and rough looking. These were tools people were using, and I especially wanted the ships to look like they had been through some shit.
Rumpus: I love the idea that the aliens, the Antheans, weren’t sending their most elite to Earth. I was curious, too, about what the first chapter was that started this project. It might not have been the first story you wrote about an alien invasion, but it was the one where you realized you needed to write a novel about this invasion and from these different perspectives. Also, is it a novel? Is it a novel-in-stories?
Housley: The origin of this novel is that I was doing a short-story project, with these stories all set during an alien invasion. But this didn’t first amount to a book that I would try and send off and get published. I started to write this longer piece, though, that wound up being the “Road to Philipsburg” narrative, which I chopped up and fit in between all the other stories. And then I did this again with the sad-spaceman story, which I wound up calling “I’m Happy, Hope You’re Happy Too,” which I stuck in at the end.
But Mason Jar Press reached out and told me they were interested in publishing it, which I was thrilled about. Specifically, it was Sarah Daniels, the managing editor there, who had a really strong and guiding hand in this book, and she said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you wrote five more alien stories?” And you know that feeling where you’re, like, “Oh, shit, that’s a really good idea, but it’s also going to be a whole lot more work for me?” As soon as she said it, though, I realized it was great advice.
Sarah was also a really attentive editor. Like with the character Clifford in the “Road to Philipsburg” sequences, who claims to love his wife and wants to get back to her? Sarah flat-out asked me why Clifford loved her and missed her. She said, “Let’s flesh her out and make her a real person here.” These were the types of things that Sarah did to really shape the overall structure of the book. The end result of this is that the book that’s come out is so much more interesting and rich, and I want to give her a ton of credit for taking the crude thing I sent her and turning it into something so much better. It shows how an editor is much more of a deliberate person when it comes to the book than the author is sometimes.
Rumpus: It made for an awesome book, and it’s incredible how all the chapters mash up together. Otho the alien’s story, Clifford’s story and how he’s essentially narrating his survivorship, and then all the snapshots about Clifford’s neighbors at the end of the world? They all mesh and weave and work so well together.
Housley: Those initial five or six stories I had were very different from the versions that appeared in the book, and they were missing a lot of that connective tissue. I’ve actually talked with people about this idea at Barrelhouse Writer Camp, this process of building and connecting stories together into a larger work. You can start off with one version that you send out to lit mags, and then you can design another version that connects to a larger world. You can resurrect characters in other stories, make references to events that happen elsewhere, and it’s just cool for readers and to work on as a writer, too.
Rumpus: In some of those stories and chapters, too, I love how you make references to your other works in what I’m affectionately going to call the “Housley-verse.” For example, one character references a book where several employees deal with the fallout of a coworker winning the lottery, which is the plot to another book of yours called The Other Ones (Alan Squire Publishing, 2022). And then another character references a story called “The Atheist Reconsiders,” which was written by Michael Czyzniejewski and originally appeared in Barrelhouse, correct? I was curious, then, about how you connect these worlds together.
Housley: Honestly, I kind of always do that now, that process of referencing my other works. Usually nobody notices, but you did, and so have two friends of mine, Monica Prince and Lee Klein. But yeah, it’s just a fun thing for me. I actually started doing that in the collection, Massive Cleansing Fire (Outpost 19, 2021).
Rumpus: Which also makes an appearance in Aliens Attack!
Housely: I think I started doing that because the Hold Steady also does that in their first three or four albums. They have certain characters that they come back to and certain phrases they repeat. So I just thought it was cool, and now I’ve started making these connections in what you call the Housley-verse.
Mike’s story, though, was different. I’ve been a big fan of his for a long time. I got the chance to talk to him at AWP, and I remember telling him how much that story stuck in my craw. I was actually reading for Barrelhouse when we accepted it for issue #7, and now it’s in his newest collection, The Amnesiac in the Maze, and it’s such an interesting idea. Basically, aliens arrive in that story, too—they don’t invade; it’s more diplomatic than that—and there’s an atheist who learns that the aliens have a similar Jesus story to Earth’s, and, fittingly, it makes him reconsider.
I’m not a religious person, but there was just something about that idea, about these invaders having their own version of Christianity, and I copied it over to my aliens’—the Antheans’—own religion. This also forced me to wonder just how similar the aliens are to us.
Rumpus: Everybody gets what they want, and none of them are happy, either.
Housley: That’s literary fiction in a nutshell.
Rumpus: Oh, absolutely. I wanted to shift gears here and ask why there are no table of contents in the book. It took me a while to notice this, but I think it’s really interesting how it lends to the idea of the book’s non-linear progression. Can you talk a bit about that decision?
Housley: I can tell you about that exactly. So there actually was a table of contents in the document that I sent to Sarah Daniels, and Sarah took it out. And she did this purposefully. I want to stress that she didn’t do anything that I didn’t 100% want her to do, but, yeah, Sarah had a really guiding hand in making this book so much better. She explained that she really felt the book was a novel, and that the table of contents suggested the work was a story collection, so we took it out.
Rumpus: I also like that the decision to remove the table of contents made it so that we don’t know what’s going to come next. We don’t know whose perspective we’re going to get, and we don’t know if we’re going to meet someone new or return to one of the characters we’ve already met. It made it surprising and chaotic, which lent a lot to the overall mood in the book.
Housley: Monica [Prince] was saying that, too. She said she didn’t know who was speaking to her every time she started a new chapter out, and that she liked that effect.
Rumpus: It made for a nice layering effect, as well, where we slowly find out how these new characters relate back to the neighborhood where characters like Clifford and Stevens and Barker live. It was great, too, that several of the sections in the work feature these couples who are experiencing the start of this alien invasion at the same time, and whose relationships are already on the brink of disaster. And then that’s when the end of the world starts. What made you want to put the microscope to these couples’ relationships?
Housley: I think that was the big question for me with this book: what would you do at the end of the world? I think I’m obsessed with that question, and I also wrote about it in another book of mine, Massive Cleansing Fire, which is what people do in those last moments. Here, the first chapter in Aliens Attack! is basically a shitty guy story. Burns has no idea how shitty he is as a husband, and he has no idea how awesome his wife is. It takes all the running and the lasers and the guns for him to realize how strong and focused she is, and that he’s actually pretty terrible.
Rumpus: It’s great that you get to see these relationship dynamics in various stages. You really find out who these couples are because they’re faced with extinction.
Housley: Tara Campbell gave me this great blurb for the book that asked, “Who would you be at the end of the world?” And that was really the writing project that I was taking on initially.
Rumpus: You can see this in Clifford, as well, and how he goes from being basically a shitty partner in this marriage and family, this milquetoast, to one of these main characters who we latch onto. His story doesn’t end with the invasion; he gets to take us through the days afterwards, on his return back to this imaginary aftermath in Philipsburg. What made him get the privilege of taking on this huge responsibility in the narrative, versus other characters whose stories stop?
Housley: You’re right; he’s a different character, but this is all done very reluctantly. He’s facing the reality of how it would be such a great relief to kill himself, to just give up, but he can’t do that, either. When I started off, I think I had this idea of a person who was just trying to get back home. But the thing that I love most about Clifford is that he’s so angry about the fact that he doesn’t understand what’s happening around him. Everybody else seems like they’ve been given a set of instructions, and he’s left out there just wondering if his fate would be changed if only he’d bought a different car. It was this great spot where he was feeling both helpless and under the assumption that everyone else had access to a playbook that he didn’t. And I feel like that all the time. I wonder, “Was there an orientation that you all had that I didn’t get invited to? Because I have no idea how any of this works.”
Rumpus: Clifford really does become one of the most empathetic, caring people in the book, and I love him. Several of the other characters reckon with their own demise by going through their personal bucket lists of things they never got to do. But how about you, Dave Housley? What’s on your bucket list of things you have to do before the alien invasion happens?
Housley: Well, clearly, I have to purchase a different car so I can figure out these instructions that everyone else seems to have been given. I would say, though, that I’m pretty content. I know I want to finish the current book I’m working on. I want to help my son figure out what he wants to do in his life. I did a lot of traveling in my 20s, so I think I got most of the travel bug out of me.
Rumpus: That’s so interesting: that you see yourself as pretty content and that you’ve made so many of your characters have a lot of regrets at the end. That they have a lot of unfulfilled wishes and things that they never got to do in their last moments.
Housley: Yeah, that’s something that I stole from Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. I mention her traveling Shakespeare company in Massive Cleansing Fire, too. That idea of how everything was so fucking awesome and we never stopped to realize it was something that I wanted to feature here. Things like running water and the existence of on-demand ice. But that concept of people having stupid regrets at the end—I never tried escargot, I never watched Rosemary’s Baby—I really liked adding in those lesser details alongside the larger regrets people might have. I imagined that those would be the kinds of thoughts that I might have at the end, too, so I gave those tinier details to the characters.
Rumpus: Station Eleven is such a good influence to have on the book, but I wanted to ask about another huge influence, both on you personally and on your work in the book, and that’s David Bowie. His music gets mentioned in the book frequently. Heck, one of his lyrics from “Ashes to Ashes” serves as the title to one of the ongoing chapters, too. Tell me about him.
Housley: Okay, that all starts from the book The Man Who Fell to Earth, by Walter Tevis. It’s such a good book, and he’s such an interesting writer. He only published six books in his lifetime, but they’re all outstanding. One was The Hustler, one was The Queen’s Gambit, and then another one was The Man Who Fell to Earth. He was a great writer and a fucked-up guy, and I love how wildly different each of his books were. But I love The Man Who Fell to Earth, and then the movie version of the book is completely insane.
The movie itself isn’t a great film, but David Bowie is perfectly cast in that thing. This was before he got his teeth fixed, so he’s this incredibly attractive guy with fucked-up teeth, and it’s fascinating.
And as for David Bowie, I love his space songs. I love the Ziggy Stardust era. Rise and Fall is definitely one of my top five albums, even when I’m not writing a book about alien invasions. But yeah, the 70s-era David Bowie is something I love: the music, the films, the idea of him evolving and changing in the Ziggy Stardust persona. So when I was looking for a title for this longer story about the aliens themselves, the Antheans, during the invasion, “I’m Happy, Hope You’re Happy Too” from “Ashes to Ashes” worked really well. I actually have a poster of an astronaut hanging in my office that has that lyric on it.
Rumpus: And like in the movie, you’ve got that great detail that the aliens look just like us (minus our extra chromosome). That, I think, is the scariest aspect about them: that they look just like us.
Housley: It is. It’s terrifying. You know, I’ve actually found myself exploring more of these ideas recently, moving more towards science fiction. Reading more of it, writing more of it. But while my stories involving humans are scary—they’re about aliens invading in these huge Zeppelins and destroying everything in sight—the stories focusing on the aliens themselves are instead almost straight-up literary fiction. These characters are sad, and, despite getting everything they want, nobody’s happy. But I’m still glad that this is all housed under science fiction, which means I can earn that cover of the book, which I love so, so much.
Rumpus: This feels like it’s been the spot where a lot of the alien-themed Barrelhouse iconography has been heading towards all this time.
Housley: It’s funny because, while I was blowing up this five-foot-tall alien balloon last night for the launch party, I was telling my wife, “You know, someday I’ll probably have an event that doesn’t involve an inflatable alien, but today is not that day.”
