Review of Our Townish by David Marusek

For the past five years I have been casting an occasional eye to the happenings in rural Alaska. It's there that David Marusek has been plugging away on a self-published series, Upon this Rock. Quirky, clever, and relevant, the series drops aliens into the middle of a rationalist versus religion scenario, sprinkles it with jimmies of the apocalypse, and sets it all loose in the Denali. It's been fun, and in 2024 Marusek published the fourth and concluding volume, Our Townish.

Our Townish picks up precisely where Consider Pipnonia left off. In fact, they should be considered one volume published in two pieces. The rogue planet Pipnonia comes crashing into Earth in the opening pages, bringing about a literal apocalypse. But it's not all death and destruction. Dead bodies mysteriously come back to life in the Alaskan bush, and slowly a new society begins to form. But is it really all that new? One by one, the skeletons in humanity's closet begin to emerge among the new residents of Alaska, threatening to take us under once and for all.