Denver Bryant is an amateur pie critic, blogging about the best and worst pies he can find in the area around his small Wyoming town of Muddy Gap. After stopping at a diner with a particularly disappointing cherry pie, they are driving home when they see a strange flash of light over their hometown. Yet no one else noticed anything, and no one is taking them seriously when they notice strange things happening - they’re just local weirdo Professor Pie, after all.
I love the premise and I love the title. Parts of this were excellent, but parts of it were less so.
The alien incursion is absolutely great. People start acting strange, and strange things start happening, and it gets weirder and weirder. It’s no simple armed invasion or festival of probing; Hess has done something far more creative and interesting here. My only critique of the alien invasion part of this book is that I wanted more of it.
Where the book is weaker is the integration of the alien invasion story and Denver’s story. Denver is non-binary and autistic, and the personal life aspects of this felt poorly integrated. Denver’s interactions with the folks of Muddy Gap just don’t seem to gel properly, rather like a lemon meringue pie that wasn’t prepared correctly. The components are delicious, but it doesn’t really hold together into a coherent whole.
(Life pro tip from someone whose lemon meringue pies sometimes turn to soup: it still works great on top of a scoop of vanilla ice cream.)
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