UNDER A DARKENING MOON

In Heasley’s speculative novel, a family weathers the fallout of an unprecedented lunar event.

Jody Conque, an ex–Catholic priest–turned–satellite researcher, is staying with his mother in Massachusetts for a few weeks following the death of his father. His mother’s grief keeps him up at night, which is how he comes to observe the strange blurriness that seems to have enveloped the moon—caused by an asteroid, he surmises—and, later, the ghostly apparition of a girl. He wakes up the next morning to news stories saying that an unknown object has struck the dark side of the moon, kicking up dust in all directions. The president of the United States has declared a state of emergency for the next 24 hours until the dust burns up in the atmosphere. When the cloud arrives, the spectacle is unlike anything anyone has seen before: “The whole sky became an undulating array, with rivers of purple lava flowing between simmering peaks of green and pink rising downward toward them.” On the other side of the dust wall, however, humanity discovers the moon hasn’t returned to normal. Instead, it’s gone perfectly black; the time known as “moondark” has begun. With flights grounded, Jody drives his dad’s old Trans Am across the country to his home in California, where his wife, Haleh, and young daughter, Claire, are waiting. It quickly becomes clear that things have changed in grand and mysterious ways: Some people have slipped into comas, others are acting strangely, and strange specters—or “shimmers”—have been spotted along the coasts. When an accident waylays him in Boulder, Colorado, Jody learns that the truth of the moon’s alteration is more than science can explain—and he’s fated to play an important role in the coming disaster.

Over the course of the novel, Heasley offers prose that’s measured and painterly, as when Jody survives a collision with a train in a way that defies the laws of physics: “All went silent. He heard no horn from the train, no music from his car. The scene was playing in some strange reverse: the train was passing, very slowly, from right to left, and he was flying backward, away from it. At eye level, he saw the conductor, mouth agape, with his cell phone in hand.” The slow-boiling tale maintains an ominous tone that many will find to be reminiscent of the works of Stephen King. The characters, too, are memorably King-ian, including Jody’s bigoted elderly mother; his preternaturally sensitive daughter; and a paranormal investigator from the Navajo Nation. The author’s commitment to constructing a bedrock of realism goes a long way toward selling the novel’s fantastical elements, and the reader will be quickly drawn along with Jody into the mystery of it all. Although the story echoes many other dystopian tales (including the real-life experience of the Covid-19 pandemic), Heasley manages to carve out new territory for himself, constructing a story that feels very much its own.

An engaging dystopian novel with elements of spiritualism and science fiction.