A traffic cone is orbiting Neptune in northern Maine. The state has put a truck beside it.
That is how New England handles the impossible: somebody arrives early, places an amber light near it, and begins an argument about jurisdiction. In Salem, a tour guide who tells visitors there were never any witches finds another version of herself living upstairs. At Quabbin, the four towns drowned for Boston’s water return during an hour the Office of Consequence has been hiding. Rhode Island’s costume jewelry develops a mineral harder than every story told about who made it.
Then Gloucester loses fifty feet. The distance opens between the city and Dogtown, and fishermen, dogs, ice workers, widows, and roofs begin occupying the same impossible edge. Nobody responds with wonder for long. Boats still need ice. People still go missing. Somebody’s brother is on the wrong side complaining about fuel prices.
These stories understand New England as a place where history is intimate, profitable, shameful, and standing directly behind you while you explain it to tourists. The humor is local and the consequences are not. What returns is rarely what the town advertised.
What it feels like to read
Expect precise local history, audacious anomalies, sharp comedy, and endings that land on human choice instead of explanation. The stories are eerie without becoming vague and moving without turning sentimental.
Three stories inside
- One Mile from the Sun: Maine’s roadside solar system becomes physically accurate, which is bad for the road and worse for the Sun.
- There Were Never Any Witches: Salem’s preferred story creates another city where the accusation was true.
-
The Hour the Office Kept: Quabbin’s drowned towns return and demand the hour erased with them.
Buy New England for the orbital traffic cone. By the time the absent Sun weighs nine pounds, it will no longer be the strangest thing in the book.
