Aliens, Drywall, and a Unicycle

Tom Tibbets takes a job at a small weekly newspaper in Portage, New Hampshire, and an apartment in the old Cooper Building, where the residents form a kaleidoscope pattern of the odd, the interesting, and even the insane.

One neighbor believes that we descend from aliens, another is a pothead-philosopher, and there's a pair of brothers who play with illegal explosives for fun. A vegan pacifist lives there, along with a couple of nomadic born-again Christians, a schizophrenic unicycle rider,...