Janey Tracey
Janey Tracey graduated from the MFA program in fiction at Columbia University, where she taught undergraduate writing. Her writing has been published in CRAFT, Fiction, Entertainment Weekly, and others. She has worked many strange jobs, including writing for a UFO website and pretending to be a chatbot for a networking app. She lives in Queens, NY. True Believer is her first novel.
True Believer
After a traumatic breakup, a young woman goes to a UFO convention and has a break with reality.
Alison is having an awakening. After leaving her longtime boyfriend and moving across the country to work for a UFO website (despite being a firm nonbeliever), she expected to feel grief. Instead, she’s euphoric, if a little untethered. Giddy in her new solitary New York life, she compulsively fantasizes about every phallic object in her eyeline: strangers on the sidewalk; her married boss, Liam; the occasional letter opener. When she and her coworkers travel to Roswell, New Mexico, for the annual UFO festival, she finds herself unreasonably consumed by thoughts of Derek, the son of an infamous abductee.
As Alison’s flirtation with Derek takes her deeper into the UFO community, she’s unnerved by her growing affection for the strange people she meets, from a man styling himself as a Cowboy Alien Hunter to an abductee who makes surprisingly gorgeous alien sex paintings. When, to get a scoop for her job, she moonlights as an experiencer in a support group run by a New Age guru, she’s surprised at how much sense the program begins to make. Newly porous and reeling from the perspective all this new distance from her old life has given her, Alison increasingly experiences a blurring of the lines between reality and the extraordinary.
Publication
US: Harper Collins (Mariner)
Release date: August 2027
