Ruby Todd’s first novel, set in Australia, has echoes of the arrival of Comet Hale-Bopp and the Heaven’s Gate cult.
For all the ballyhoo about the total solar eclipse this past April, the event didn’t stir up much in the way of conspiracy thinking. The same cannot be said of the comet that flies across Ruby Todd’s debut novel, “.” Todd’s comet, named St. John, is a fictionalized version of Comet Hale-Bopp, which visited our solar system in 1997 and played a role in the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult members outside San Diego.
Sylvia, who narrates the novel, is a deeply depressed funeral home director whose husband died two years earlier in a hit-and-run car crash. Sylvia had been driving when they were struck. Now she’s physically recovered but haunted by survivor’s guilt, surrounded by the dead at the office as well as in her thoughts. She plans to take her own life on the night that Comet St. John first appears to the naked eye, a date that will coincide with the two-year anniversary of her husband’s death.
Sylvia is pulled from her downward spiral by, of all people, the comet’s original discoverer, Theo St. John, an Arizonan probing the skies from a nearby observatory. A standoffish sulker himself, Theo is handsome and pensive, and his amorous inroads prompt the gradual collapse of Sylvia’s plan. Given her mind-set, there’s nothing easy about romance . But, like a cosmic pheromone, here comes that comet. For Sylvia and Theo, the time is now.
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