Flying Humanoids

by Mark Kneece

Nurse Etta Lane is a fish out of water who just keeps getting farther from the pond. She might have remained another woman of “quiet desperation” if she hadn’t met Mrs. Ransom in the geriatric unit of Grenton-Horace Hospital. Ninety-year-old Mrs. Ransom is sure that “flying humanoids” are real. She’s seen them on TV, and she claims to have met them. She is determined to go to them in Machu Picchu, where she believes they abide. When a sequence of unimaginable developments sets into motion, involving criminal goons, broken families, and possibly other worldly beings, Etta finds herself--along with Carl, Mrs. Ransom’s son—traveling. From the hospital to a broken down farm in Middle Georgia to Lima, Nazca, and the Sacred Valley of Peru, one unexpected turn follows another. The old lady even seems to be getting younger as odd characters hand her special bottles of water along the way. (Or is it all in their imaginations?) Meanwhile, the bad guys from Georgia close in. Etta and Carl not only have trouble keeping up with Mrs. Ransom in the thin air of the Andes, but begin to consider that things they have overlooked might really exist in the world. Events force Etta and Carl to face their human fears and frailties in order to learn the miraculous and mysterious possibilities of life. On uncertain footing, far from home, Etta discovers the difference between being human and being “oid.” (This book was formerly called Shaky, Fuzzy, Out of Focus. It has since been retitled, as you see, and heavily edited and revised.)

277 pages, Paperback

Published December 14, 2020

About the author

Mark Kneece has written stories for numerous comics, including Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight. He helped found the sequential art department at the Savannah College of Art and Design and teaches comics writing as a professor of sequential art. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.