Best New Book Review: Terrestrial by Suzy Eynon

Terrestrial by Suzy Eynon

Reviewed by Jonathan Danielson

On March 13, 1997, lights appeared over Phoenix, Arizona. Witnesses described them as a massive, V-shaped formation drifting silently overhead. Later, more lights appeared, only these hung motionless in the sky. For the whole night, 911 switchboards were overwhelmed while news stations were flooded with shaky home videos recorded by people who had stepped out onto their driveways or climbed on their roofs and zoomed in as far as their camcorders would allow.

I was thirteen the night of the Phoenix Lights, which is what the event was ultimately called. I never saw them, though. In fact, I had no idea they even happened until the next morning when I brought in the day's Republic. That's the thing most people forget, or perhaps don't realize, about that infamous night when UFOs apparently lingered on the Phoenix horizon. Because every home movie you see now, whether on YouTube or the History Channel, comes with the running commentary of wonder or awe or fear or downright confusion from the person recording it. And what people forget is how quiet that night was. How ordinary. How easy it was to miss if you weren't paying absolute attention.

Suzy Eynon hasn't forgotten. Her new novella Terrestrial (2026), out now from Malarky Books, begins with the line, "It was easy to disappear if you were quiet" (7), and tells the story of Daisy, a high schooler in an imagined desert town outside of Phoenix, who slips through her world largely unnoticed and who may or may not be communicating with aliens. The story uses that uncertainty to articulate what otherwise cannot be said about our lives here on Earth, about the body we inhabit during our teenage insecurities, and the ways family fails us in both terrible and minute ways, and how childhood friendships are complicated by the chaos of puberty. Yet what risks seeming pedestrian comes off here as extraordinary, because it is Eynon's restraint, both in her narrative and prose, that forces the reader to become as quiet as Daisy and linger in what, unbeknownst to the rest of the world during the midnight hours, is ordinary yet just as powerful and complicated as V-shaped lights hovering above us in the Arizona night.

What further distinguishes Eynon's novella is its attention to place. Arizona, through much of its literary history, has largely been rendered through the lens of Zane Grey, all cowboys and schoolmarms and courtly love in Stetsons, or other types of extractive literature that draw on place without engaging the large and small histories of the area. Eynon wants no part of that. Her Daisy wears her Oliver Miller Phoenix Suns shirt and feels outright "disdain for all western- themed places and things: saloons, cowboy hats, cacti sculptures planted in concrete, silver-toned boleros” (23), because she is an Arizona kid who is simply a kid. What Eynon offers here is a quiet Arizona, one that exists outside its expected performance, where place is experienced through daily life, and where meaning accumulates in small, nearly invisible ways.

Ultimately, Terrestrial is a novella about aliens that has nothing to do with aliens, but rather the transmissions we send into the world, often times never knowing if or how they will be received. Yet it is the act of sending them across vast distances we cannot fathom that forces us to realize how surprisingly close we are to one another.

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Jonathan Danielson is the author of The Lowest Basin: Arizona Stories (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2025), which was longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Fiction and named to Southwest Books of the Year. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Arizona State University and an MFA from the University of San Francisco. His scholarly work focuses on the intersections between Creative Writing, the Western, and Arizona literary regionalism.