This is the internet home of Dave Housley, author of Aliens Attack!, The Other Ones, Looney, The Greys (with Becky Barnard), Howard and Charles at the Factory, Massive Cleansing Fire, This Darkness Got to Give, If I Knew the Way I Would Take You Home, Commercial Fiction, and Ryan Seacrest is Famous.
Aliens Attack! is open for pre-order and comes out officially on April 21, 2026!
Told through the men and women—and aliens—who experienced it firsthand, Dave Housley's sci-fi novel ALIENS ATTACK! presses us with the big question: what would you do at the end of the world? Intertwining the depth of sonder with the honesty of reality, Housley brings us the truth of what an alien invasion would look like in each of our lives. From a woman who realizes the man she’s about to marry has a dark secret to a priest addicted to oxycontin holed up with a choir he despises, ALIENS ATTACK! is pockmarked with wry humor, pop culture references, and authenticity. Housley holds the mirror up for us and tells us to behold what we cannot run away from—ourselves.
Advance praise for ALIENS ATTACK!
“This book won’t just break your heart. It will burn it, blow it up, zap it like the titular aliens attacking. It happened to me - but I’ve also never been more grateful to an author for introducing me to characters—aliens, dads, clergymen, kids—who in the midst of crisis behave in such a poignantly, perfect human way that I’m still thinking about them, long after leaving them back on that burned out earth.” —Amber Sparks, author of Happy People Don't Live Here
“Dave Housley is one of my favorite writers, in general, and almost certainly my favorite within the genre of the Dumb Idea™ (complimentary). By which I mean taking a premise that is on its surface too silly, or one-note, or gimmicky for Literature, and infusing it with humanity—the beauty and complications and bullshit and warmth and everything else that makes up being a real person in this world. In Aliens Attack!, Housley turns those talents toward perhaps the very Dumb Idea™ he was most meant to write, and the result is everything I could have wanted it to be and more.” —Aaron Burch, author of A Kind of In Between, and Year of the Buffalo
“When the shit hits the fan, you’ll still be you and what about that? ALIENS ATTACK! is an existential coming-of-age, the truest, realist thing I’ve read in a hundred years. It should be terrifying but I found it to be enormously comforting. I don’t know why. Worthy of mention in the same breath as Ursula Le Guin but better because it’s an expression of the keen, funny, perceptive mind of Your Friend Dave.” —Laura Scalzo, author of American Arcadia
“What would you do—really do—in an emergency of planetary proportions? How capable, ethical, and heroic would you be? In this novel about an alien invasion of earth, Housley smuggles uneasy questions like this into our brains with wry humor and cleverly intertwining narratives. Multiple perspectives from both sides of the invasion equation show us calamity from the perspectives of everyday people (and aliens) who are vulnerable, fallible, and feel refreshingly real, reflecting ourselves back to ourselves.” —Tara Campbell, author of City of Dancing Gargoyles and TreeVolution
The Other Ones
"“Dave Housley’s The Other Ones is a riotous and bighearted office comedy, about a surprising kind of Rapture where it’s not a heavenly force that whisks away half of your co-workers but a winning lottery ticket you forget to throw in on. Fans of Chris Bachelder or Sam Lipsyte will thrill as Housley applies eight point eight million dollars worth of regret to his loveable left-behind heroes, eager to learn who will crack among the cubicles and who might find another way to win their own good life.”
— Matt Bell, author of Appleseed
Massive Cleansing Fire
"Once again, Dave Housley has shaped a singular collection to dazzle and delight, this time with a tool as old as civilization itself: fire. In eight stunning stories and an equal number of interstitial vignettes, Housley wields spark and flame and smoke as plot device, metaphor and theme, while balancing his uproarious comic sense with an unerring glimpse into the human heart. Reader, Massive Cleansing Fire doesn’t care that the roof is aflame. It lets that motherfucker burn."
- Tom Williams, author of Don't Start Me Talkin' and Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales
Howard and Charles at the Factory
"Housley's a madman and his book Howard and Charles at the Factory is a pitch perfect funhouse mirror view of our ridiculous times. We're all Howard and Charles standing in front of a closed factory waiting for the world we knew to make sense. Read this in front of a shuttered factory, while looking for dinosaurs and UFOs, or just any moment you want to feel pleasure in a mad, mad world."
— Rion Amilcar Scott, author of The World Doesn’t Require You
“It's time to admit what everyone knows: there's no bolder, no wittier critic of our modern, polarizing American culture than Dave Housley, who points out the absurdities in our relationships while reminding us why we must hold on to each other." -- Susan Muaddi-Darraj, American Book Award winner, A Curious Land, author of Behind You Is The Sea
