Alien

Ali Raz

An exhilaratingly quiet adventure of extraterrestrial proportions.

- Vi Khi Nao

Noirish, enigmatic, hilarious, and queer AF, Alien is a must!

– Jessica Alexander

Alien is a rogue transmission from the xenomorphic cityscape. Tune into the signal.

– Mike Corrao

Ali Raz’s neo-noir Alien is a story of blood and lipstick written in “mirrored handwriting."

– Candice Wuehle

These pages throb and sparkle, revealing glimmers of defiant life in a world where nothing can live.

– David Leo Rice

A brilliant fable of belonging and not-belonging, of having and seeking, of being alien, unawares.

— Steve Tomasula

About

In a city infested with aliens, a haunted alien hunter sets out on a hazardous quest involving a secret radio station, a seemingly omniscient group called “The Syndicate,” and a host of either friends or foes. Laced with intergalactic paranoia, soft-boiled charisma, and the slick ambience of a horror show, these streets will permit only one outcome…

Out Now! // August 23, 2022

Advance Praise

Ali Raz's Alien is razor-thinned, technicolored, designed to cut through the polaroidic “invisible, geometric sequence” of a malevolent network of shifting, exoskeletal, circus-esque realties. An exhilaratingly quiet adventure of extraterrestrial proportions. Expectedly, Raz’s protagonist hunts and documents “small, humanoid, and blue” and has metal teeth and antennae that can pick up signals like a radio. A poet’s radio. And, has South Asian impulses and palettes such as banyan trees, sugarcane juices, lizards, and kites. Raz portrays this locked down alien world with explosive precision, scorching carnage, and telescoping sublimity. A messenger or passenger of rats, bees, microencephalopaths, and cockroaches, her language is incisive, acute, and deftly original like “rosewater mixed with gasoline.” With quirky protagonists such as B, Q, FF, CoP or a monster who picks “its teeth with a skyscraper” and captivating places such as Moon Market or a mass exodus, it’s an alien, blackouted, queered, violent world (“[a crow] dips its beak into my sockets like into an ink well, eating my eyes”) you don’t want to ever miss. If you are truly cool. –  Vi Khi Nao

Alien is so vivid, so slick and dynamic; it’s like watching a train jolt the landscape awake or the panels of a graphic novel sear thick, sharp strokes into a page. Raz’s writing is like nothing else: grungy, moody, mystifying. An alien hunter, a shrine where the city’s denizens sway in drunken worship of a saint, a royal fort pitted with significant holes, blue cotton candy, blue aliens and clowns, musty bricks in dark and narrow alleys, sexy lesbian spies in lipstick and black heeled boots. Noirish, enigmatic, hilarious, and queer AF, Alien is a must! –  Jessica Alexander

Ali Raz has once again created a beautiful and innovative poetic work. Spoken through the disembodied voices of melancholic silhouettes. Threading the half-erased narratives of mystery, massacre, and cosmic communication. Alien is a rogue transmission from the xenomorphic cityscape. Tune into the signal. – Mike Corrao