A debut novel that looks to the heavens and the Heaven's Gate cult.

Shiny objects can illuminate, but they can also blind. That's the paradox in the title of Ruby Todd's clever and propulsive debut novel about a bright comet, a grieving widow, a troubled romance, and a budding cult.

“Bright Objects” is set in the mid-1990s in Jericho, a small Australian town where Comet St. John is destined to make its closest and most impressive approach to Earth. Throughout history, people have viewed comets as omens of triumph or disaster. In Jericho, too, the impending appearance of Comet St. John seems to resonate with meaning. It unites a group of true believers who will move from meditation to dangerous supernatural daydreams.

Todd's narrator, Sylvia Knight, first meets Joseph, the group's prophet, at the funeral home where she works. He's planning an elaborate farewell for his late mother. Sylvia understands the pain. She's still grieving the accidental death, two years earlier, of her husband, Christopher.

She was driving at the time; Christopher was her passenger. They were struck by a speeding vehicle that then fled the scene. A witness to the accident proved to be of little help. And Sylvia is convinced that the culprit, too powerful to be prosecuted, is the town's police chief, an assumption that drives her increasingly unhinged, even violent.

As the investigation falters and Sylvia finds existence without Christopher unbearably bleak, she carefully plans her suicide. What is left to tie her to her ruined life, apart from a beloved cat and Christopher's equally devastated mother, Sandy?

But then Sylvia encounters a stronger impediment to self-inflicted death: her attraction to an American astronomer, Theo St John, discoverer of the comet of the same name.

Theo, whom she also meets at the funeral home, seems ambivalent about starting a romance. Sylvia attributes his approach-avoidance behavior to the idea that he is also in mourning (but for whom? Or for what?). In any case, his imminent return to the United States makes a future together unlikely.

As the plot develops, Sylvia’s reliability as a narrator is called into question. She may not intend to deceive, but she will later admit to her “blindness” and her “instinct for grievance and self-punishment.” The way Todd frames the book, as an account of her narrator’s two deaths, helps to disorientate attention. Is Sylvia somehow narrating the story from beyond the grave? This has been done before, notably in Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones.”

Todd, an Australian-based writer and winner of several literary awards, knows how to draw readers in. Her prose is elegant yet accessible, her narrative embraces both mystery and quick-moving plot twists, and her protagonist, though flawed, remains sympathetic. And Todd's influence grows ever greater as the story becomes downright chilling.

“Bright Objects,” says its acquisitions editor, is “loosely inspired” by Heaven’s Gate, a California-based cult whose members committed mass suicide over the appearance of a comet. The comet in “Bright Objects” is fictional, but the emotions it provokes recall the awe inspired by other celestial phenomena, such as the recent solar eclipse.

In this case, the comet—the quintessential bright object in the book, but not the only one—serves as both symbol and emotional catalyst. “Like the indicator dye doctors use to reveal disorders in the body,” Todd writes, “the comet seemed to be revealing all of us and each other, in various registers of fear, hope, and hubris, like divergent clusters of cells within the same host.” In another passage, Sylvia compares it to “an urgent hieroglyphic of a language I do not speak” and suggests that it represents “the rift between logical reality and oblivion.”

Although Sylvia is fascinated by both the comet and its discoverer, she also initially responds to Joseph’s appeal, which is rooted in what she calls “a longing to prove that the real illusion was that we were just this: just organic forms waiting to expire, accidents of nature appearing and disappearing without reason or design in an indifferent universe.” For Joseph, she suggests, “the supposed divide between the physical and the spiritual…wasn’t a real divide at all.” Anyone yearning for communion with a lost loved one might find such a conviction seductive.

But that doesn't make it true. In the end, though her prose struggles with its charms, Todd is skeptical of the supernatural. Still, she accepts the idea that life can be mysterious, unpredictable and complex. And she doesn't give up on the notion of fate altogether.

Take, for example, that fatal car accident and all the aftermath that ensued. A single different action, Todd writes, at his most lyrical, “might have been enough to divert the particular physics of what was about to happen, the collision of objects and lives in space and time, the instantaneous disappearance of certain futures in favor of others, as each of us moved like pawns in a celestial chess game, toward that bend in the road under that dark country sky.”

Julia M. Klein is a reporter and cultural critic in Philadelphia.