A young boy uncovers secrets and conspiracies in a small Massachusetts town with his new best friend in Ludwigsen’s coming-of-age horror novel.

The down-on-their-luck Castillo family leaps at the opportunity to move from Queens to a seaside New England town rent-free while the father, Ted Castillo, works to set up an off-shore oil rig. Bud Castillo, the family’s 13-year-old son (and the book’s narrator) is more than happy to tag along after a mysterious incident leaves him ostracized by his Boy Scout troop. Massachusetts promises a fresh start: a new school, new friends, and new scout troop. Unfortunately, when Bud and his family arrive at their new home, they discover a town in a state of total decay, with only one other child roaming around. This child, Aubrey Marsh, quickly befriends Bud; the two decide to form a scout troop together (with the support of Bud’s mother) and investigate the town’s dark past. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that something strange is afoot in the Lovecraft-inspired town of Innsmouth—after all, as Bud’s mother astutely asks, has anyone “ever heard of oil in Massachusetts?” Ludwigsen does an excellent job building tension and a conspiratorial atmosphere as Bud and Aubrey try to uncover what’s really going on in Innsmouth and determine what lurks just off the coast. With an eclectic array of townsfolk, anchored by the charismatic and frightening Reverend Pritchett, who runs the outwardly progressive (but also kind of cultlike) local church, the author slowly lays out the pieces of a compelling mystery. This mystery starts to fall apart by the final third of the book, however; in the narrative’s earlier sections, Ludwigsen mesmerizes with a distinct narrative voice, but events unfold rather abruptly as the climax nears. It’s an excellent set-up with a disappointing pay-off.

A smart send-up of Lovecraftian horror that doesn’t quite stick the landing.

Fabulist Ludwigsen (In Search Of and Others, 2013) returns with a fresh collection of surreal tales from the dark side.

As in his previous volume, Ludwigsen uses a popular television show as a rough framework for his eerie tales. This time, the early 1960s late-night show is called Acres of Perhaps and is clearly standing in as a cheaper, more oddball version of The Twilight Zone. Our narrator for this primary story is Barry Weyrich, a writer haunted by his perceived lack of talent or ambition. “I was just Barry Weyrich, the guy who wrote about spacemen in glass bubble helmets, who put the commas in everyone’s scripts, who never had writer’s block, who grimaced when they talked about 'magic,' " he tells us. His frenemy among the other writers is David Findley, an “eloquent drunk” whose expansive imagination fuels the show’s strangest episodes and who turns out, in the end, to not be quite whom he represented to his friends. A handful of interstitial entries scattered between four more stand-alone stories offer synopses of episodes from Acres of Perhaps along with wry show notes. “The Zodiac Walks on the Moon” offers a peek inside the head of the Zodiac killer and his take on the moon landings. “The Leaning Lincoln” echoes some of Stephen King’s more grounded stories, with a tale of a small leaden toy that brings calamity with it. Other than the title story, the collection’s cleverest attraction is “Night Fever,” an oral history that imagines that Charles Manson was imprisoned during the 1960s and emerged fully obsessed with the Bee Gees in the days of disco. Ludwigsen ties things up with the elegiac “Poe at Gettysburg,” which imagines the erratic poet as president delivering a very different version of the Gettysburg Address.

Evocative tales of alternate realities steeped in the ethos of Shirley Jackson and Ray Bradbury.

Mundane reality mixes with the magical and the macabre in this scintillating collection of speculative fiction.

Inspired by the pop-enigma TV anthology hosted by Leonard Nimoy, Ludwigsen’s droll yet haunting title piece sets the tone, answering the puzzling questions with a blend of mythology and cynical common sense—“[t]he creature in Loch Ness was a plesiosaur, but it died in 1976 and locals concealed the carcass”—that eventually homes in on a homicide detective’s buried secrets. In other stories, characters confront the supernatural—or actively recruit it: A realtor specializing in haunted houses and murder scenes seeks out those special buyers who might like “stigmatized properties”; a 13-year-old girl tries to quantify her dog’s dream world for a science-fair project; a cantankerous hillbilly family resists government agents who want to upload their consciousnesses into a paradise simulation; a sentient house tears lose from its foundations and embarks on an epic journey to salve its guilty conscience; and the imaginary kingdom of Thuria intrudes into several narratives, cropping up in an off-kilter scouting expedition, a mother’s psychotic break and a post-modern literary scholar’s research on an ancient coded text. Ludwigsen’s well-wrought, entertaining tales feel like a mashup of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, and his evocative, whip-smart prose steeps readers in a realism that’s mordantly funny and matter-of-fact but glimmering with whimsy and horror that leaks around the edges. The stories also work as subtle explorations of character and psychology, especially in the superb story “The Ghost Factory,” in which the spectral inhabitants of a defunct mental hospital enact the spiritual dysfunctions of modern life by fading from the world. Ludwigsen’s creepy, comic world reveals plenty about our own.

Crackerjack genre yarns with real literary depth and polish.