PUNTA GORDA, Florida, USA – While writer Malcolm J. Brenner has never met ET in person, or even seen a UFO, his longtime fascination with space creatures inspired his new novel Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair.
“Aliens multiplied all over my 1950’s youth,” the author of Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover said, “whether in monster movies, science-fiction novels or the scholarly works on my father’s bookshelf.” Those included 1953’s Flying Saucers Have Landed, by self-proclaimed alien “contactee” George Adamski and British historian Lord Desmond Leslie, and M. K. Jessup’s sobering 1955 analysis,The Case FOR the UFO (still in Brenner’s possession).
“Although I’m known for my experiences with dolphins, I probably wouldn’t have gotten interested in them if brain researcher Dr. John C. Lilly hadn’t convinced NASA to fund his attempts to teach dolphins English, so that we’d know how to reply to extraterrestrial aliens,” Brenner said. (The 1960’s experiment was unsuccessful because the dolphins had their own ideas, but that’s another story.)
Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair is a fast-paced novel told in four separate and distinct timelines stretching from 1978 to 2004. The stories all center on Susie Louise McGonagall, a shy young college student following her mother and grandmother into teaching. Convinced she is unattractive, Susie works a summer job at a western resort. Awakening one night, she finds a tall man in a silver suit at the foot of her bed. She’s is paralyzed with fear – until she notices he’s injured! Susie follows the silent stranger into the darkness and aboard his damaged spaceship, which has crash-landed near her family’s cabin in the Rockies… or has it? Is this cosmic apparition real, or the product of Susie’s imagination in overdrive?
That’s the question investigative reporter Toby Parsons tries to answer, seventeen years after Susie’s original experience. They’re engaged when the chance viewing of a TV show triggers her buried memories of Mel-Khyor and the living spaceship that brought him to Earth. As Susie’s story is revealed piece by remembered piece, Toby finds himself torn between wanting to believe her and not daring to, between his conflicting roles as a skeptical reporter and a compassionate husband-to-be. Neither of them knows a U.S. government alien-hunting unit is also looking for Susie…
With a sweep that ranges from the La Plata Mountains of Colorado to the rings of Saturn and beyond, Mel-Khyor is a riveting novel of adult passions and interplanetary intrigue.
Available as a trade paperback from amazon.com, (https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0692775528) $14.95 + S/H and from Sandman Books (http://www.sandmanbooks.com) in Punta Gorda. Soon to be available as an ebook on Smashwords. For a complimentary review copy, or to arrange an interview, contact the author at the e-mail address above.