Review: Extraterrestrial Noir by Rich Leder

A sardonic mixture of science fiction and snarky suburban drama, Extraterrestrial Noir by Rich Leder is a hilariously original genre mashup.

Maggie Devine is drowning in the suffocation of suburban competition and an embarrassingly stagnant marriage with her husband, Connie. Along with the three other couples and their children who call Hope Circle home, life is a predictable and increasingly dull rerun of picket-fence perfection that doesn’t quite live up to that American dream. All of that changes, however, when a mysterious silver box rockets down through the atmosphere and crashes neatly through the couple’s roof.

The box quickly begins to mutate, while casually absorbing the collective knowledge of human history in the span of a single evening. By the next morning, it has transformed into the living, breathing, and spitting image of Alan Ladd, the legendary leading man of film noir classics that Maggie has loved for years. The highly intelligent and ethically flexible visitor makes it very difficult to keep his arrival under wraps, particularly after authorities start sniffing around the neighborhood following a suspicious diamond heist.

Unflinching and savage at its sarcastic edges, the dialogue crackles with simmering tension, especially in those moments when neighborly politeness collides with the unregulated emotions of human nature. The character balance of adults and children is also unique, allowing for a full exploration of immaturities and unexpected strengths in this eccentric cast. On first glance of the premise, the novel may seem like a combination of Desperate Housewives, Starman, and The Burbs, with a strong dash of the titular noir, but it is much more emotionally layered than that – as much drama as comedy.

The story also delves quite deeply – even seriously – into some heady issues, as only a sci-fi novel can, wandering into philosophical explorations of everything from astrophysical limitation and crises of morality to the dynamism of romance and the inconceivable varieties of life that may exist in the sprawling universe. So while the novel may pose as a cozy work of fiction about ordinary people facing extraordinary situations, it is also layered with commentaries on personal, governmental, scientific, sexual, and ethical boundaries, along with the obvious madcap scenario of a celebrity alien.

This is not to say that the novel isn’t funny, because it is. Leder is an expert at the searing one-liner, revealing human absurdity in a seemingly ordinary scene. Given the larger-than-life premise, Leder has the chance to spread out even further than his previous works of crime fiction, offering a hilarious satire of several genres at once, while also making readers interrogate their own feelings about loyalty, family, and humanity’s fickle nature. That’s an incredibly tough balance, and Leder handles it masterfully.

Topping out over 500 pages, the story could be streamlined to some degree. Much of the writing is refreshingly lyrical for science fiction, but sometimes this license is taken too far, as some passages might try to be too clever with stretched metaphors that diminish in impact as they increase in complexity. In terms of pacing, the beginning of the novel is intriguing, but more sluggish than the rest, with the extraterrestrial element of the plot first making an appearance after fifty pages. Leder is an exceptional storyteller, but he might need to kill his darlings; the clever filler isn’t poorly drawn, just somewhat superfluous, which can get in the way of narrative flow.

Critiques aside, this wildly entertaining satire of everything from gumshoe novels, domestic dramas, first contact sci-fi, and even America writ large is an impressive work of contemporary sci-fi that manages to be thought-provoking, emotionally rich, and hilarious, all within pages of each other.