The Kelly Incident

Rating:
Summary: The Kelly Incident - The Truth Makes Strangely Appealing Fic
Review: A Review of:

The Kelly Incident
by Anna Karyl
Gate Way Publishing
2004


Review by Barry Jobe
[e-mail]


"The Kelly Incident," by long-time author (but first-time novelist) Anna Karyl, is many things - all of them fascinating, and thoroughly entertaining.

It's a chilling fictional retelling of a classic UFO encounter, one that took place in rural Kentucky in 1955 and still puzzles researchers and scholars.

It's a moving love story, an honest example of the way that real love can transform two lives and reach across an almost unimaginable cultural chasm.

It's a charming evocation of a time in America when Eisenhower was President, television was in black-and-white, Coke was ten cents a bottle and a tank of gas - pumped by a uniformed attendant - cost four dollars.

And perhaps most important, "The Kelly Incident" is a compelling mystery. This book skillfully presents a mystery that touches deeply on the UFO phenomenon that has plagued and challenged millions of Americans for more than half a century - and a mystery that goes beyond what is known about UFOs, to explore new, troubling potential answers.

But more than any of that, "The Kelly Incident" is a great "read." I can honestly say that I read it at one sitting, turning pages as quickly as I could, pressing on from incident to revelation to scene of touching humanity.

Feeling like she's being hazed by her hard-nosed boss for being late - again - a skeptical young reporter is sent from bustling 1955 St. Louis to the wilds of rural Kentucky to debunk yet one more Deep South swamp myth. Glowing lights in the summer sky, and weird creatures harassing credulous backside-of-beyond country folk.

But what she discovers is the best night's sleep in years, the most incredible breakfast she's ever tasted - and a couple of simple, honest salt-of-the-earth types who are sincerely terrified by what they've experienced. She also discovers a heavy-handed cover-up by the local deputy sheriff, a harsh shunning of the witnesses by their neighbors, and mysterious involvement by the military and a pair of closed-mouth government officials. She also discovers a handsome, soft-spoken young man whose open manner and gentle smile begin to capture her big-city heart.

In short, everything she thought she knew or believed - from the logical, straightforward rationality of the universe to the clear superiority of big-city life - is challenged. Then, pushed too hard by officials intent on covering up whatever it was that happened in rural Kentucky, this young reporter buckles on her courage and plunges - like Alice through the looking glass - headlong down the rabbit hole. There, she dives head-first into a world beyond her belief - seemingly beyond reality - yet as plainly true as the face that looks back at her through her own bedroom mirror.

"The Kelly Incident" weaves a compelling true story with a page-turning mystery, overlaid with a love story that takes its two lovers to the edge of reality - and beyond.


Barry Jobe is the author of the SF stories Plowshare and Mothership



Rating:
Summary: Worlds Collide on Many Levels in 'The Kelly Incident'
Review: Do you believe in UFOs? Well why not?

As author Anna Karyl puts it: "Millions of us know that 'phenomena' ... that which presents itself ... are real."

Stories abound, evidence accumulates, believers multiply. And the unifying thread is not, as might be supposed, the credibility of the documentation and eyewitness accounts.

Rather, it is the steadfast demeanor of benign neglect and poorly concealed eye-rolling and hand-waving and dissembling and obstructionism on the part of otherwise presumably responsible government and military officials.

The Kelly Incident erupts from a collision of two worlds ... a collision on many levels: interpersonal, geographical, and, without making too great a point of it, cosmic.

This is compelling, highly descriptive storytelling: Conspiracy ... Off-Earthers ... Project Strange ... clairvoyance ... mental aberrations ... paranormal phenomena ... Renaissance artists painting UFOs ... pushing the envelope of evolution ... liaisons with cosmic Beings ... reptilian alien interlopers ...

It is a spiderweb of ever-tightening threads that wrap around its two leading characters -- a St. Louis journalist and a rural Kentucky motel manager -- as they move from disbelief, fright, and wonder, to deepening love, then to cosmic understanding and acceptance, and an unknown future.

We learn we may well be part of an evolutionary experiment called "The Human Project," supervised by -- well, let's call them the Beings.

Worlds are colliding here, make no mistake. It is helpful symbolism that our heroine, Helen Wheeler, is a Lois Lane look-alike, a journalist at a great metropolitan newspaper, working for a hard-bitten but lovable editor, dealing with unearthly phenomena and forces beyond her comprehension -- but you get the idea.

Lois -- er, Helen -- begins not with healthy skepticism, but with deep-seated disdain for her assignment and its Kentucky venue. "Everybody knows that the average Southerner doesn't have the I.Q. of a turnip," she says, in my favorite line from the book. This isn't merely "attitude," it's the 1955 equivalent of Yuppie arrogance and disgust with anything from Fly-Over Territory.

"Anybody who says that they've seen an Unidentified Flying Object has to be crazy, right?" she asks.

Well, maybe.

The book, based on a true story -- a classic in the annals of Ufology, as Anna Karyl puts it -- acknowledges its debt to Ufologists and Experiencers, for their "contributions that added to the sum of human knowledge."

The 1989 movie, "Millennium," ends with a classic line, a voice-over from the narrator: "This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end. It is the end of the beginning."

In homage, the final chapter of The Kelly Incident is titled "The End of the Beginning."

The Kelly Incident is the kind of story of which stories are told.