Lacy’s (The Night is a Constant Lover, 2012) first foray into fiction is a sci-fi soap opera with cosmic time travel, a malevolent astrophysics professor and aliens monitoring everything.

A man travels from Germany to the U.S. with his daughter, whom he’s impregnated. The young girl adopts the last name Alaska, and down the lineage is born Travis T., a twelve-fingered physicist who creates a time machine. Enter power-hungry Dr. Angstrom, who works at perfecting time travel, in part so he can send men into the past to kill Travis’ grandparents, allowing the professor to take credit for Travis’ creation. Lacy’s novel is ambitious in design, following the Alaska clan’s origins in great detail, and it involves a vast number of people: Ruby Gold, a spiritual being hoping to be incarnated; aliens, or “grays,” who watch and occasionally abduct Alaska family members; and Cotton, who acts as narrator, searching for a vampire that killed his parents. The abundance of characters doesn’t allow much time for development—the titular character appears only sporadically—and some of the significant players either have no personalities, such as time-traveling hit man Joseph Lullaby, or are simply mentioned in passing, like Travis’ rather eccentric parents. Though the book’s title sounds decisively YA, the material is anything but; it delves into rape, incest, inbreeding and murder. Nonetheless, Cotton is telling this story to children at a diner. Provocative content notwithstanding, Lacy drops in bits of well-timed humor—Travis dates two women named Kathy and notes a tendency to bungle their names—and manages to incorporate time travel into the plot in sensational ways, as when a character uses it to stop a suicide or two people travel in time during a scuffle. Though nonlinear, the plot maintains momentum by avoiding repetition and steadily progressing regardless of when it’s set in time, and even the occasional change to a first-person perspective remains clearsighted.

A time-traveling story that entertains with madcap characters and wildly capricious plotlines.

Lacy, a civil servant, musician, artist, and poet, (Heroes and Villains Down the Halls of Time, 2013) details a life as a recurring subject of so-called alien abduction phenomenon.

Born in Texas, the young Byron was not expected to survive a childhood case of sarcoma cancer. Yet he did, miraculously. In 1961, he witnessed a flying submarinelike thing at close range over his entire elementary school class as they exercised in the yard (he now surmises that the apathetic substitute teacher, the only adult supervisor, was a human-alien hybrid). Other uncanny events include repeated narrow escapes from deadly car accidents. Only in 2009 (after seeing a couple of “stargates” materialize in the sky) was Lacy convinced by his conspiracy-occult buff friends that he—and most likely his family—had been alien plagued and abducted for generations, and the imaginary playmate “pirates” Byron saw as a little boy were the enigmatic intruders, messing with human perception. Byron believes he and fellow “abductees” endured many strange experiences: missing time, bodily implants and mysterious scarring, and “little gray” humanoids. Genre superstar Whitley Strieber makes guest appearances at conventions, and while Byron’s solid, plainspoken prose contrasts with Streiber’s wild emotionalism in the cult-classic contactee memoir Communion, one does somewhat miss Strieber’s (at least initial) frantic quest for alternative explanations to the incredible. For Byron, it’s obvious; skeptics be damned, aliens are everywhere, countless folks are being abducted, and some extraterrestrials are giant insects, some are reptiles. He also contends that the U.S. government covered up that spacemen fought with troops at Dulce, New Mexico, and our moon is filled with machinery feeding on human torment. “Some weird stuff if you ask me,” Byron writes, a sublime understatement. 

A far-out, disconcertingly readable memoir that flatly declares everything about aliens you read online or see dramatized on TV is true.