What Happens When Nobody Panics

Every alien story I’d ever read or watched had the same opening move: the lights appear, and people lose their minds. Screaming. Running. The military rolls in. Someone fires a gun. Civilization teeters.

I wanted to write the opposite.

In Rumor Road, six lights appear over Monterey Bay one evening in 1951. Phosphorescent domes, humming at a frequency nobody can quite explain, returning each night like a tide. And the people of Cannery Row — the ones who stayed after the sardines left and the canneries went dark — look up, look at each other, and go about their business.

Not because they’re stupid. Because they’ve survived enough. The sardine bust took everything the Row had built and left it standing in its own rubble. The people who remained were the ones who’d developed a specific relationship with the unexplainable: you note it, you watch it, you don’t give it more power than it’s earned.

Manny at the bait shack marks the lights’ position relative to his roof and keeps selling bait. Luz at the diner pours coffee and keeps her observations to herself. Doc writes careful, thin entries in his notebook, trying not to trap something that prefers not to be named. Inland, a farmer named Eli notes the lights and goes back to fixing fence posts.

The government, of course, panics. Men arrive with clipboards and measuring devices and the bureaucratic vocabulary of people who believe that naming a thing gives you authority over it. The Row receives them with the politeness of hosts who have no intention of being helpful.

That’s the whole book, really. Not what the lights are — but what a community does when the inexplicable shows up and they’ve already used up their surprise on things that mattered more.

Rumor Road is available on Amazon.

— G.A. Thompson