THROUGH THE RAGING STORM

Some residents of a small Texas town team up to protect their amazing find—an apparently sentient alien device—from questionable strangers suddenly lurking in the area.

In Kilgore’s SF novel, the camping-destination town of Vanderpool experiences a summer thunderstorm that coincides with sightings of a strange, lighted, flying object, seemingly landing in the wilderness. Joe Garner is the proprietor of the local Lost Maples General Store and—when not nurturing an incipient romance with Martha, the pleasant, divorced woman operating a baking business out of her house—he keeps his eyes open for anything unusual. A youngster patronizing the store brings Joe a piece of extremely hard, lighter-than-water, ceramic-type material. This is a substance that’s impossible to make using current human technology. Joe and his friends (including the proud managing director of a roadside vintage motorcycle museum) follow the trajectory of the UFO sightings and come up with an incredible discovery newly embedded in the Texas soil. Dubbed the “Blue Burrito,” it’s a bullet-shaped object more than four feet long, covered in curious seams and designs. When mysterious strangers come calling, full of questions about whether the locals saw any space debris during the storm, Joe and the other Vanderpool residents, mildly miffed by their deceitful manners, decide to hide the Blue Burrito. Joe and a cohort only show the astounding artifact to Randy, a scientist, and plan to surrender it to NASA authorities when they see fit. This first-contact story is more of a down-home portrait of life in the Texas Hill Country, where the residents all have one another’s backs and are generally friendly to outsiders but know when something doesn’t smell right. The Blue Burrito, an atypical SF alien “space thing,” seems to get a warmer reception than the outside pursuers because it does not tell any lies about itself. The prose and the science go down smoothly and easily, and the book, while not breaking any new ground (unlike the Blue Burrito), makes a nice Gulf beach or weekend read, especially for Lone Star State visitors down San Antonio way. Readers may be charmed to know that Vanderpool is a real place.

A homey, engaging extraterrestrial tale that’s more The Tex-Files than TheX-Files.