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.

Because it's effectively the second half of one volume, Our Townish is a difficult book to introduce without spoilers. Major, dramatic events occur in the first fifty pages that define how the remaining four hundred play out. I'll just say that the reset button on McHardy, Alaska is pushed. Some people “survive”, while others slumber forever in shallow graves. Another way of putting this is, Marusek condenses human society into a nutshell to better highlight the themes at play, primarily religion vs rationalism. How well Marusek interrogates that juxtaposition will be up to each reader, but none can argue he didn't set the stage for a proper contrast.

Our Townish had several plot threads to tie off, and it does. Jace and Deut's relationship reaches a conclusive point. The Prophecy family's dirty laundry gets cleaned. And the mystery behind the aliens is revealed—how they can appear as angels to some and ETs to others. The final scenes, while perhaps erratic, feel right, closing the series and theme satisfyingly.

The biggest challenge Our Townish presents readers is the speed with which the post-apocalypse scenes evolve. They happen quickly. Marusek clearly had a series of scenes he wanted to get through, and in trying to squeeze millennia of human social evolution into a couple hundred pages, he plays fast and loose . Undoubtedly there will be readers, including myself, who feel many of these scenes needed more unpacking. But at the same time, unpacking everything would likely have been a trilogy unto itself. Which means the thematic contrasts should be appreciated for their brevity, even if the dynamics are not fleshed out as well as they could have been.

In the end, Our Townish delivers. It's not a step above or below the preceding volumes; Marusek is, if anything, consistent in prose and style. It answers all the questions—inter-character, alien, and thematic—and provides some entertaining fiction in the process. Some readers may dislike how quickly some of the dramatic scenes move, but it's likewise possible to say the novel packs a lot in. Will this go down as the greatest examination of religion vs. rationalism in the history of literature? No, but it certainly accomplishes the examination, comes to a human conclusion, and provides unique, page-turning story in the process. For the concluding volumes of a series, it satisfies.