Introduction
Michael Libling’s novelette “The Placemat at Baldy’s Diner,” published in the March/April 2026 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, represents a mature and formally inventive entry in the author’s expanding body of short fiction. A World Fantasy Award finalist whose work has appeared consistently in the genre’s most prestigious venues—including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies—Libling here demonstrates an ability to synthesize the conventions of soft science fiction with the emotional architecture of literary realism. Building on the affective complexity visible in his novels Hollywood North (ChiZine/Open Road Media) and The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife (WordFire Press), the story marks his sixth appearance in Asimov’s and arguably his most technically ambitious short work to date.
“The Placemat at Baldy’s Diner” is, at its core, a story about the phenomenology of return—the bewildering process by which a consciousness, estranged from itself and its history, is gently restored to coherence. Libling deploys the conventions of UFO abduction mythology not primarily as speculative premise but as a structuring metaphor for grief, identity dissolution, and the fragile continuity of selfhood across time. The thesis of this review is that the story achieves genuine literary distinction through its sustained dramatic irony, its subtle manipulation of narrative point of view, and its transformation of genre tropes into vehicles for a searching examination of loss, belonging, and the human need to construct meaningful narrative from the wreckage of experience.
Plot Summary, Setting, and Characters
The story follows a man named Shore, introduced in the opening pages as a grief-hollowed wanderer in his late forties, driving a rusted Mustang through New England, sleeping in his car, and keeping despair at bay through motion and noise. He has lost both a daughter and a wife, and the reader is told he has been unable to face “that empty house, their empty bed, his empty life.” Stopping at Baldy’s Diner fifty miles northwest of Boston, Shore is drawn to the decorative placemat on the counter—a tourist guide to local curiosities featuring UFO-themed attractions along the New England seacoast. This ordinary object becomes a fateful map, drawing him toward the UFOtel at Molasses Bay, a Victorian inn run by the enigmatic Ava Post.
Ava’s husband, Noah Post, a self-published mystery novelist, vanished fifteen years earlier in what witnesses described as an alien abduction, alongside an environmental activist named Ivy Addison. In the years since, Ava has transformed the inn into a UFO-themed tourist destination, sustained by the mythology of her husband’s disappearance and the annual “Saucer Days” festival in the neighboring village of Pulpit-by-the-Sea. The inn’s other principal inhabitants include Gabriela (Gabby), Noah’s now-adult daughter, who harbors rational suspicions that her father simply ran off with Ivy Addison, and Sonny, Noah’s teenage son, born months after his father’s disappearance and carrying a stopgap name until his parents can name him together upon Noah’s return.
Shore checks in under the pretense of being a journalist, interacts with the family over the course of a day and night, befriends Sonny, confronts the abusive Clark Crandell (Gabby’s boyfriend), and sits through the fifteen-year commemoration ceremony on the beach. In the story’s climactic revelation, the reader understands—through a cascade of accumulated clues—that Shore is in fact Noah Post himself, returned by aliens who prepared him for homecoming through a simulation: an experience of loss, wandering, and rediscovery designed to ease his reintegration. He wakes on the beach the following morning, recognised by Chester Lovett, and reunites with Ava, Gabby, and the son he has never met.
Critical Analysis
Theme: The Ontology of Return and the Simulation of Grief
The story’s central thematic concern is the question of what it means to return to a life that has continued without you—and the epistemological difficulty of recognizing one’s own home from inside a radically altered consciousness. Libling frames this through the lens of contemporary discourse on simulation theory and the philosophy of time, most explicitly via the character of Dr. Gertrude Hayden, whose speculations about alien temporality and the preparation of returning abductees function both as exposition and as ironic revelation. Hayden’s description of the hypothetical simulation—”begin with you behind the wheel of a beloved vehicle, have you stop at a familiar diner, provide you with a roadmap of sorts to home”—is delivered to Shore himself, who cannot yet perceive its autobiographical accuracy.
This thematic architecture invites comparison to what critics have described as the “palimpsest narrative” in contemporary speculative fiction, wherein a surface story conceals and gradually reveals a deeper textual layer. Peter Stockwell’s work on cognitive poetics and the “text world theory” offers a useful framework here: the reader constructs a mental text-world for Shore as a bereaved everyman, then is required to reconstruct that world entirely upon the story’s revelation (Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics in Practice, Routledge, 2002). The disorientation this produces is not merely plot-mechanical; it mirrors the phenomenological disorientation that the story thematises. Shore-as-Noah cannot distinguish simulation from reality because, at the level of lived experience, no such distinction is available. His grief is real. His love for the old Mustang is real. His nascent attraction to Ava Post is real—if uncanny in its apparent spontaneity.
Libling draws here, whether consciously or not, on a tradition in speculative fiction concerned with the plasticity of personal identity under radical discontinuity. Philip K. Dick’s recurring preoccupation with the question “what is real?” resonates throughout the story, particularly in Shore’s closing interrogation: “Where are the seams? The dividing line between where he was and where he is? Or are they pulling another fast one on me?” The question is left genuinely open, which constitutes one of the story’s more intellectually satisfying gestures.
The theme of grief and its narrativization runs parallel to the theme of return. Shore’s loss of his daughter and wife—losses articulated in the story’s opening pages—initially appears to be biographical backstory. In retrospect, these losses are understood as components of the simulation’s emotional landscape: experiences fabricated or distorted to calibrate Noah Post’s affective state before re-entry into the life he actually left behind. That the simulation chose grief as its primary idiom is significant. It suggests that the aliens—or the story’s implied cosmology—understand grief as the most efficient vehicle for reconnecting a consciousness with the bonds of love it has temporarily vacated. This is a quietly profound observation about the relationship between loss and attachment.
Narrative Form and Point of View
The story’s most technically accomplished feature is its management of point of view. Libling writes in close third person throughout, remaining tightly anchored to Shore’s perspective. This is a calculated risk: dramatic irony of this magnitude depends entirely on the author’s ability to make available to the attentive reader the information that the protagonist cannot consciously access, while avoiding the trap of either telegraphing the revelation too early or withholding it so completely that the retrospective rereading feels dishonest.
Libling threads this needle with considerable craft. The story is seeded with anomalies that are readable as naturalistic eccentricities on a first pass—Shore’s inexplicable sense of having eaten at Baldy’s before (“He’s eaten here before. He’s sure of it”), his inability to recall the plot of Close Encounters of the Third Kind despite knowing he enjoyed it, his surprising physical competence when subduing Clark Crandell (“He’s shocked by his own strength”), his not knowing whether Sonny’s name is spelled with an “O” or a “U.” These details, retrospectively decoded, reveal a consciousness operating within a simulation that has imperfectly replicated certain knowledge structures while leaving the core of Noah Post’s identity intact.
The story’s prose style is characterized by tonal control and a deft deployment of register shift. Libling moves fluidly between lyrical interiority (“He is homesick for what can never be again”) and comic deflation (“Shore is baffled. People read this crap?“), deploying humor as both characterization and structural counterweight to the story’s elegiac undertones. This tonal range is characteristic of the best literary genre fiction, and it prevents the story from tipping into either sentimentality or ironic detachment.
The embedded texts—the placemat’s tourist-guide copy, the book jacket blurbs for Noah Post’s INNvestigators series, the news clippings in the hotel lobby—function as paratextual frames that simultaneously advance exposition and thicken the story’s texture. Gerard Genette’s theorization of the paratext as a “threshold” or liminal zone between text and reader is particularly apt here: the placemat itself is figured as a threshold, the object that guides Noah Post home across the boundary between his absent and present life (Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Cambridge University Press, 1997). The title of the story thus operates on multiple levels simultaneously.
Characterization
Shore/Noah is rendered with sufficient psychological depth to sustain both readings of his identity. His sardonic humor, his impulsive protectiveness toward Sonny, and his tentative attraction to Ava Post all cohere with the picture of a man whose fundamental character has survived fifteen years of alien custody intact. Libling wisely does not psychologize excessively; Shore is present to us primarily through behavior and dialogue rather than interiority, which preserves the ambiguity necessary for the story’s mechanism to function.
Ava Post is the story’s most compelling secondary figure. Libling resists the temptation to render her as a passive object of sentiment. She is, instead, characterized as a genuinely astute entrepreneur who has constructed meaning—and a livelihood—from incomprehensible loss. Her acceptance of Shore’s transparently implausible journalist cover story is initially puzzling; in retrospect, it reads as an instance of unconscious recognition. Whether this is a deliberate authorial choice or a convenient coincidence is not entirely clear, though the former reading is more thematically satisfying.
Gabriela Post serves a crucial structural function as the story’s internal skeptic. Her insistence on the “obvious” explanation for her father’s disappearance—an affair with the attractive Ivy Addison—introduces genuine epistemological friction into the narrative. She is the story’s designated voice of rationalism, and her skepticism is neither dismissed nor fully vindicated by the ending. That Noah did not, in fact, run off with Ivy Addison does not mean Gabriela’s interpretive habit—privileging the probable over the improbable—is incorrect as a heuristic. Libling respects her position even as he refutes it.
Sonny, the most vulnerable figure in the story, functions as both emotional catalyst and symbol. His provisional name—Sonny, a stopgap pending his parents’ joint naming—literalizes the state of suspension in which the entire Post family has existed for fifteen years. His relationship with Clark Crandell, who inflicts physical abuse in the name of paternal substitution, introduces the story’s most ethically charged subplot and provides Shore with an opportunity to perform, however instinctively, his identity as a protective father before he consciously recovers that identity.
Genre Context and Cultural Situatedness
“The Placemat at Baldy’s Diner” situates itself within a long tradition of New England-set speculative fiction, from Lovecraft’s cosmic horror to Shirley Jackson’s domestic uncanny. The coastal New Hampshire/Massachusetts setting—with its Victorian inns, tourist economies, and atmospheric isolation—draws on the region’s deep association in American literary culture with the liminal, the strange, and the historically weighted. The UFO mythology that structures the story’s plot draws explicitly on the documented history of American abduction narratives, including the Hill case (1961), the Parker-Hickson case (1973), and Betty Andreasson Luca’s accounts, all of which Hayden cites within the text. This grounding in documented cultural history lends the story’s speculative premise a sociological texture that purely invented mythology could not provide.
The story also engages with the economics of trauma tourism—the transformation of personal and communal grief into commercial spectacle—with an irony that is gentle but persistent. Saucer Days, the UFOtel’s gift shop economy, the annual commemoration as Lollapalooza: Libling neither condemns nor fully endorses the enterprise Ava Post has built. Instead, he treats it as a deeply human response to incomprehensible loss, an attempt to hold space for something that cannot be explained and refuses to resolve. This reading connects to scholarship on what Dean MacCannell has called “staged authenticity” in tourist culture, and more recently to work on dark tourism and the commodification of tragedy (MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, Schocken Books, 1976; Stone, “A Dark Tourism Spectrum,” International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, 2006).
Evaluation: Strengths and Weaknesses
The story’s principal strength is its structural integrity. The dramatic irony operates with precision, and the revelation—when it arrives—reconfigures every preceding scene without violating any of them. The Hayden monologue that triggers the transition, in particular, is a formally elegant passage: exposition, characterization, and plot mechanism operating simultaneously. The story also benefits from a genuine affective warmth that prevents its ingenuity from feeling merely mechanical.
There are, however, identifiable weaknesses. The subplot involving Clark Crandell, while emotionally effective and thematically suggestive in its treatment of surrogate fatherhood, is not fully integrated into the story’s resolution. Clark disappears from the narrative without consequence, and the question of Gabby’s relationship with him—raised with some urgency by Shore’s confrontation—is left unaddressed. Whether this constitutes a deliberate structural ellipsis or an instance of insufficient resolution is debatable, but readers seeking thematic closure on this thread will be disappointed.
Similarly, the character of Chester Lovett, who functions primarily as comic relief during the breakfast scenes, is promoted to a pivotal role in the story’s final lines when he is the first to recognise Noah Post on the beach. This elevation is not entirely prepared for by the preceding narrative, and the final pages’ rapid accumulation of named characters—Pastor Lynchfell, Clark Crandell, DJ Bunny, Mollie—risks diluting the emotional focus of the reunion.
Gertrude Hayden is a richly conceived figure, but the question of whether she is genuinely an alien collaborator in Noah’s reintegration—a possibility raised by her uncannily precise description of the simulation—is not definitively resolved. Shore’s final thought, “And God bless the would-be Gertrude Hayden, whomever she might be,” gestures toward this ambiguity without fully developing it. This may be intentional—the story is not obliged to explain everything—but it leaves a thread sufficiently visible that its unresolved status registers as an oversight rather than a deliberate lacuna.
On the question of originality, the story’s central conceit—a returning amnesiac gradually recognising his own life—is not novel. One finds analogues in Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, in the tradition of the revenant spouse in folk literature, and in numerous science fiction treatments of amnesia and identity. What distinguishes Libling’s version is the specificity of its social texture—the tourist economy, the family dynamics, the embedded media texts—and the subtlety of its emotional register. The story earns its resolution not by surprise alone but by the careful accumulation of the human detail that makes the reunion meaningful.
Conclusion
“The Placemat at Baldy’s Diner” is a formally accomplished and emotionally resonant work of speculative short fiction. Libling’s management of dramatic irony, his tonal range, and his deployment of genre conventions in the service of humanist themes confirm his standing as one of the more sophisticated practitioners currently working in the magazine science fiction tradition. The story’s thesis—that the most vertiginous journey of all is the return to what one has always known and briefly lost—is developed with intelligence, warmth, and craft.
The work’s minor structural weaknesses do not substantially diminish its achievement. The Clark Crandell subplot and the ambiguous status of Gertrude Hayden represent opportunities for revision or expansion rather than fundamental flaws. In its present form, the story functions as a complete and satisfying artifact.
For further study, productive avenues would include an examination of the story in the context of the American abduction narrative as cultural myth (drawing on Jodi Dean’s Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace, Cornell University Press, 1998), a comparative reading alongside other treatments of the returning figure in contemporary speculative fiction, and an investigation of Libling’s broader use of the diner as liminal space across his body of work—a recurrence that suggests an authorial mythology worth examining in its own right. The story’s engagement with simulation theory also invites more sustained philosophical treatment than this review has been able to provide.
Ultimately, “The Placemat at Baldy’s Diner” demonstrates what the best genre short fiction can do: use the resources of speculative premise to excavate experiences—of grief, disorientation, belonging, and homecoming—that literary realism approaches more directly but, in Libling’s hands, less completely.
Works Cited
Dean, Jodi. Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Cornell University Press, 1998.
Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Schocken Books, 1976.
Stone, Philip R. “A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a Typology of Death and Macabre Related Tourist Sites, Attractions and Exhibitions.” International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, vol. 1, no. 2, 2006, pp. 145–160.
Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics in Practice. Routledge, 2002.