Beings, by Ilana Masad.

A brilliant concept, admirably executed. Four stars.

Ilana Masad’s Beings is one of those strange, intriguing novels that unexpectedly sneaks up on you. On the surface, it’s about UFOs, specifically the famous 1961 Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction story that totally fascinated me when I was a teenager. But the deeper you get into the book, the more you realize it’s really about memory, identity, loneliness, and the stories people tell themselves in order to survive.

Masad structures the novel around three intertwined storylines. One follows fictionalized versions of Betty and Barney Hill and their increasingly unsettling encounter with the unknown. Another centers on Phyllis, a lesbian science-fiction writer navigating queer life in 1960s Boston through letters, longing, and the search for community. The third follows a present-day Archivist, an isolated nonbinary researcher piecing together both stories while wrestling with hazy memories of a possible UFO encounter from childhood.

It’s an ambitious undertaking, and for the most part, Masad pulls it off beautifully. The shifting perspectives and timelines occasionally became confusing, but there’s a real elegance in how the themes echo across decades. Alien abduction becomes a metaphor for alienation itself — for being watched, exposed, misunderstood, or forced into a narrative by the outside world. The parallels between the Hills’ public ordeal and queer identity in mid-century America are handled with real intelligence and subtlety. The whole concept of relating queer identity with alien abduction is just mind-blowing. Brilliant.

What surprised me most was how literary the book feels. Parts of the Hills’ sections have an almost dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness quality. Meanwhile, Phyllis absolutely steals the novel whenever she appears. Her chapters crackle with energy, yearning, humor, and frustration. I honestly could have read an entire novel just about her life in Boston’s hidden queer underground. I’m sure the author was flooded with requests for a novel about Phyllis, and I’m ready to pre-order it right now if she agrees to do it.

This is not a plot-heavy page-turner, I have to say. There’s no giant revelation waiting at the end, and readers looking for straightforward science-fiction or horror will be disappointed. The book is much more interested in ambiguity than answers. But that’s also what makes it memorable. Beings asks whether truth even matters as much as the stories we build around it, and whether being truly “seen” by another person might be the closest thing any of us ever get to contact with the unknown.