Faith, Fiction & the Absurd: A Conversation with Andrew Hall, Ryan Habermeyer, & Robert Bennett

What happens when faith meets the absurd? And what can the strangest stories tell us about the most serious parts of being human?

In this episode of Dialogue Book Report, host Andrew Hall and writer Robert Bennett welcome Ryan Habermeyer, author of the novel Necronauts, the collections The Science of Lost Futures and Salt Folk, and the short story “Bring Me the Head of Ezra Taft Benson,” published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

From a surreal auction of Mormon historical artifacts to a Utah boy with a cosmonaut helmet grafted to his head, Habermeyer’s fiction delights in the grotesque, the irreverent, and the improbable. But beneath the absurdity lie serious questions about belief, belonging, loss, and the stories we tell to make sense of our lives.

The conversation explores Mormon folklore, literary influences ranging from Brian Evenson to Eastern European absurdists, the uneasy relationship between fact and fiction, and Habermeyer’s journey toward embracing Utah and Mormonism as his literary territory. Along the way, he considers why literature should make us uncomfortable, how humor opens space for difficult conversations, and why faith can be both a poison and an antidote.