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Acres of Perhaps

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Acres of Perhaps

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Paperback
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Overview

Acres of Perhaps collects acclaimed weird fiction writer Will Ludwigsen's recent and most heartfelt stories; these are tales that delve into what crime means, could a person live a different life than the one of the moment, what humanity can do about the big and small evils of the world...as well as inspired serial killers, haunted presidents, cursed lead figurines, and a weird late-night 60s television show that meant much more to the fabric of reality than it let on. Written for lovers of the work of Patricia Highsmith and Cordwainer Smith, these stories are brutal and honest and strange.

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About the Author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590213650
Publisher:	Lethe Press
Publication date:	04/08/2018
Pages:	204
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.47(d)

About the Author

Will Ludwigsen has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award for his prior collection, In Search Of and Others. He has a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of Southern Maine. His short stories have appeared in Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy as well as Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons and many other magazines. His favorite word is "admiral."

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Editorial Reviews

★ 02/05/2018
The third collection from Shirley Jackson Award finalist Ludwigsen builds on its title story, a tale of a fictional old TV show and its creators that avoids most of the worst sins of stories focused on writers and invokes the better tropes (“Then, being writers, we spent the night getting drunk and bitching about the money men”). Ludwigsen expands his original story with the five titular “episodes,” brief synopses of fictional Acres of Perhaps shows. But the real meat of the collection is in the remaining stories, particularly “The Zodiac Walks on the Moon,” which dodges the clichés associated with tales about real serial killers, and instead explores how the Zodiac killer might have reacted to the Apollo 11 moon landing (“I understand the impulse to look up, though. To wonder”). Ludwigsen goes to the serial killer well again with “Night Fever,” reimagining Charles Manson in the late-’70s disco scene in New York City, mostly from the perspective of those around him who are affected by his actions. It’s a simple conceit that works magnificently. There are no duds in this small collection, and the highlights will easily win Ludwigsen a number of new fans. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"...a simple conceit that works magnificently....the highlights will easily win Ludwigsen a number of new fans." - Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Evocative tales of alternate realities steeped in the ethos of Shirley Jackson and Ray Bradbury." - Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2018-02-11
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.

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