Over this summer PRoB will be featuring the work of upcoming readers that will be appearing at Pittsburgh’s venerable Hemingway’s Poetry Series, now celebrating it’s 52nd anniversary. Short story writer Dave Housley will be appearing on May 26th, 2026 at Hop Farm Brewing Company in Lawrenceville alongside Timons Esaias, Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, Michelle Maher, and Judith Robinson.
These selections all appear in parts of my novel-in-stories Aliens Attack! As you can tell from the title, this is a book about an alien invasion, and how, as one reader has said, people’s “messy lives get messier” at the very end. This book has scenes straight out of a science fiction movie – zeppelin-shaped UFOs shooting lasers at the Starbucks on the corner – but it is also very much a character-based book, and part of the writing project for me was imagining where various characters minds might roam as they faced what seems like an end of the world and their own small, particular, and messy place in it.
From The Children The Children:
He looks again at the layer of dust and grime covering the station wagon’s dashboard. Most of it, he guesses, is his own skin. Some of it is Ellen’s, part of it would be the twins, who have literally grown up in the same filthy car seats they sleep in right now. Will they all be vaporized before he even has a chance to get the car washed, get in some kind of regular cleaning schedule like the neighbor with his Mustang?
He runs a finger along the back of the steering wheel and looks at the grime.
“We are stardust,” he says.
“I can’t even right now,” Ellen says.
“It’s a…” he starts, but what is the use? Now is not the time for hippie anthems. He wonders if this is really it. The end. All of the apocalyptic books and the movies focus on the first part or the part after, the part where the rules are already in place, loose societies formed, where traveling Shakespeare companies wander the roads on foot. None of them ever talked about the part where a father is driving his young family back toward Central Pennsylvania with no idea if there is anything to go back to, if the Subaru is going to be blasted into nothing by a zeppelin-shaped alien ship, if they are the last people in the world, if there are instructions everybody else is following but him.
From The End of the World As We Know It:
Below it is complete madness. The ships are getting closer. Behind them the city is on fire, everything burning and smoking. My mind starts to roll the highlights reel, as close as I’ll ever get to my Oscars moment. My sister and I jumping off a rope swing. My mother smoking in the back yard, the sound of her laugh, a high tin tin tin when my aunt says something funny. Vickie and Sammy and Troy goofing around on the rooftop of our dorm. Troy doing one of his monologues over a Super Big Gulp or a beer or a bottle of bourbon. The last night Troy and I had together, too much wine and a failed plan to actually go out to a bar to catch a band like the old days.
For a second, I want to tell him everything. I wish things had gone differently with us, with me, my career. I wish I had really tried LA or New York. I wish there had been more time for us to figure out whatever it is between us now that we’re both finally single, now that we’re both finally supposedly grown-ups. I wish there was more everything. I wish lots of things but now we’re here on this roof and the UFOs are getting so close I can see the seams on their sides.
From The Road to Philipsburg:
Sometimes when we are traveling at night I lose it for a few minutes and I don’t know where we are, what we are doing, my legs are working but my brain is back to where it used to go, worrying about how are we going to save enough to have a decent Christmas for the boys, do we need to feed Jalen more protein, get him more exercise, see some kind of specialist. And then I’ll hear the whir and the static noise, and I’ll remember where we are again, sink back into myself, into this, into everything, and the nothing that’s left.
We are a day away from Philipsburg.
In Lonesome Dove, this one old cowboy winds up carrying his partner cowboy’s body all the way from Montana back down to Texas. It’s a thing that doesn’t really make sense, a thing that in the book seems like a real surprise and then like a thing the one cowboy would definitely do, it’s a thing that’s beautiful and stupid and kind of doomed, and I feel like that’s what I’m doing with Jalen right now, dragging his still-alive body with me to Philipsburg, beautiful and stupid and kind of doomed.
