Acres of Perhaps

by Will Ludwigsen

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. These stories are the collision of imaginative fantasy and brutal realism.

Genres: Short Stories

195 pages, Paperback

First published April 22, 2018

About the author

Will Ludwigsen's stories have appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Blood Lite, Interfictions 2, and many other places.

The intersection of these strange and scattered venues seems to be Will's fascination with weird mystery: signs of a dark and sublime imagination behind the universe. If he doesn't see those signs, he's more than happy to add them himself.

Reviews

[Berengaria · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

short review for busy readers:
"Stories and Episodes" is the perfect subtitle for this 'concept album' of a short story collection based on a fictional "Twilight Zone" type TV program from the early 1960s. The collection includes stories about the writers on the show, run-downs/backstage looks at the most famous episodes, and two "what if?" alt histories. Highly entertaining, thought-provoking, fresh, somewhat strange, lightly but competently written. Fast read. Highly recommended.

in detail:
Will Ludwigsen is going on my 'discoveries of the year' list.

Not only is his low-budget Twilight Zone style TV show "Acres of Perhaps" a pleasure to read about, the inclusion of episode summaries and tales from the set cleverly make it seem like we're huddled on a sofa watching a documentary of the show many years after it went off the air.

The characters, even the side characters, are fully rounded and the many topics the episodes touched on engaging, as only good sci-fi or paranormal stories can be.

The two things that don't really match the TV show theme are the two alt American histories. I read them as what our channel-surfing self flipped to during commercials, although that's not specifically stated or perhaps intended.

One story asks: "How would the American Civil War have been different if a reluctant Edgar Allan Poe had been president and not Lincoln? Or at least how would the Gettysburg Address been different?"

The other asks: "How would Charles Manson and The Family have been different if they'd happened in the late '70s and not in the late '60s? Night Fever instead of Helter Skelter?"

It's fun to see how Ludwigsen alters and tweaks actual history in these stories, and he even got me to hop onto Wikipedia and read a long ass article on Manson to see how much he changed. (Answer: a lot, but only mildly)

Another bonus is the Author Notes in which Ludwigsen describes his ideas and inspiration for each story. I've never seen that done so thoroughly and it really does bring a new dimension to what we've just read (and where he outs himself as not too fond of TV, but strangely inspired by it! I can totally relate.)

My only critique of this creative 'concept album' of a short story collection is that many of the pieces are too long. That is, they continue sometimes well past their natural endings giving them a somewhat out-of-time feel for a bit, like a chatty guest who's overstayed their welcome when the hosts just want to clean up and go to bed.

If Ludwigsen had more to tell, he should have started a new story, or given us a break and then a "Part 2" or similar. That would have made this a full 5 star work. As it stands, about a 4.5. I'm definitely looking forward to reading more by him!

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark, fun, surprisingly moving collection of what-if stories. I was thoroughly charmed by this book. Will rocks.

[L.A. Fields · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of intriguingly macabre mashups. There’s the spooky origin story behind an alternate Twilight Zone (which comes with its own meta episode summaries and everything!). You get answers to questions like, ‘What would Charles Manson have done with disco?’ and ‘What would Poe have said at Gettysburg if he’d been President instead of Lincoln?’ An enjoyable bonus at the end are the Story Notes which discuss where these ideas came from in the first place.

What you’ve got here is a show that’s practically an episode of itself, books inside of short stories, histories within fictions and vice versa, and all of it followed by stories about the stories themselves. Read this if you want your mind to be gently turned inside-out a few times, it’s the best kind of unsettling.

[Rand]

I liked the Singularity story.

Some of the others were too liminal/unfinished to really captivate me.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an unexpected delight. It was my first time reading Ludwigsen and I really enjoyed the tone, a little old fashioned and a smidge odd. The idea that ties the whole thing together, the story of a low budget Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents style TV show presented alongside some of its episodes was a nice touch, although the initial story about the show perhaps overshadowed the succeeding stories that were supposedly on the show. The consistency of tone and voice helped to pull this off in a way that I don't think many writers could. Ludwigsen's ability to stick very close to truth make his fabrications completely believable. His portrait of how things would have gone with the Manson family if they had been in the 70's kept making me believe and the use of citations was fabulous. His is a more subtle magic than many genre works and it's all about imagination, the everyday fantasies that get a person through the week. These may not be stories of otherworldly marvels but they will envelope you in a way those larger, more outrageous tales can never do. I even enjoyed the story notes. Readers who prefer novels may find this story collection less jarring than most because the shifting of gears is minimal.

[Jack Haringa · Rating 5 out of 5]

As well-drawn as Priya Sharma's, these stories contain more whimsy and more horror--much like the TV show that inspired the collection. Ludwigsen is one of the best working in the business, and one of the few names that might sell me on a magazine even if I don't recognize any others. Tihs is a wonderfully inventive and unpredictable collection that every fan of horror or short stories should read.

[A.C. Wise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Acres of Perhaps is a slender collection, but one with an interesting conceit. Many of the pieces are fragmentary, describing episodes of a non-existent, Twilight Zone-like TV show, called Acres of Perhaps. Like The Twilight Zone, Acres of Perhaps occasionally pushes boundaries to make both political points and artistic ones, while other episodes are straight up campy sci-fi. All of this is established in the opening story of the collection, appropriately titled “Acres of Perhaps”. The story focuses on the fictional show’s writers, each with their own vision for the series. The “tortured genius” of the bunch, David, believes he’s had an actual encounter with the supernatural, after falling through a hole in a massive stump in the woods, and emerging in a weird mirror-world where everyone is almost, but not quite like themselves, and where he is more creative and productive than he ever could have been in the reality where he belongs. The story plays with and deconstructs the idea of genius, and the creative muse, and what counts as an acceptable sacrifice in the name of art – health, family, friendship, love? The story blurs the line between reality and fiction, never fully answering the question “of whether anything supernatural is going on, and it’s all the stronger for it.

The story feels true – the rivalry and affection between the writers, the struggle against budget constraints and studio notes, David’s battle with alcoholism, and Barry and his lover having to live a closeted life due to the attitudes of the time, yet still being able to enjoy support and acceptance within their writers’ circle. The snippets of episodes interspersed with the other stories in the collection add richness to the opening story and vice versa. While the other stories are not directly connected to Acres of Perhaps, they do have the uncanny feel of stories that could take place within the series’ universe, with many exploring alternate timelines – particularly “Night Fever”, which places Charles Manson in the era of disco, and “Poe at Gettysburg”, which imagines Edgar Allan Poe as president – and asking the all important question at the heart of that type of science fiction show: “what if”.

[Allan Dyen-Shapiro · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author has mastered the art of finding the horror in the mundane, but doing it in creative ways. My favorite story in this collection posits what the Charles Manson story would have looked like had it happened in the 70s rather than the 60s. The replacement of Helter Skelter with Night Fever had me chuckling at first, but the seriousness with which the author took the subject maintained the true horror of the real events. Done in semi-epistolary fashion, as excerpts from several different made-up books, he managed to flesh out all of the characters, in all of their creepiness.

The title story was cute--nominally a horror story but not really too terrifying--a large hollow stump that a mentally ill character thought was a portal to another universe in the multiverse, but was really only a stump, focused the acts of an early 1960s TV writing crew for a rather odd TV series that resembled The Twilight Zone but with unusual humor. The author kept coming back to that story--inserting script summaries of rejected stories between the other stories.

The last story was the most creative. Edgar Allen Poe rather than Abraham Lincoln as President, with the Gettysburg Address as Poe would have written it. I think I would have appreciated it still more had I been more familiar with Poe.

The prose is superb throughout (as befits stories originally sold to Asimov's or Nightmare), and the disturbed and somewhat off feeling of this type of horror was sustained throughout.

Highly recommended.

[Atom Yang · Rating 5 out of 5]

The beauty of Acres of Perhaps lies in Ludwigsen's writing and his ability to distill the magic and terror of times past, on both a societal and personal scale. This anthology brims with the deeply felt emotions of a boy told not to cry with the back of a father's hand. When I finished the audiobook (the narrator does an excellent job), I immediately wanted to start over, because I didn't want it to end.

[Carolyn O'Doherty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quirky. Entertaining. Odd. Beautifully written. To enter Will Ludwigson's world is to step sideways into a reality that is just a little bit off. History is tweaked just so. Stories move in ways that are not quite possible. Reading these stories entertains, but the words also stay with you. They are haunting and strange, always starting with the best of all literary questions: what if...?

[Brian James Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fun and creepy collection of strange scenarios written so convincingly real that you'll be looking up some of the characters. It's been a little bit since I read this book, but I highly recommend it. Especially good for nights of insomnia or times when you need an immersive escape from reality.

[Melanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

On Nightmare Mag podcast.
Dnf'd, waaaaay too much misogyny for me.

[Tanner Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting read for me. Ludwigen's writing is something that really interests me and I cant wait to read more from this author. 10/10 would recommend to anyone who likes a good read.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had never heard of him until Paul Tremblay put his latest novel, a Boy Scout story set in Innsmouth, on his 2024 best-of list. Read the description of that and flipped, and then read descriptions of his other books and flipped twice more. (Lotsa flipping in my house, metaphorically speaking, 2+ weeks ago.) And yeah, loved this first encounter. Conceit is the writers' background stories for and scripts/episodes from an early-60s Twilight Zone-type program, though weirder and edgier than the real one, with an anti-capitalist political edge that comes through in shows I would love to have seen in real life and that are funnier, angrier, and more disturbing than Rod Serling's mainline liberalism.

The voice here is what really compels--lean, amused, dry, witty, with the kind of sharp one-line condensations of experience that remind me of, unusually, this Charles Baxter collection I'm finishing right now. There's Manson in 70s Manhattan via a patchwork of newspaper articles, pulling off what he calls "Night Fever," along with a theory that this could have happened only then, and even a cameo for Leslie van Houten, the real-life Manson groupie who here is free to write a dismissive take on his DJing ability for Rolling Stone. My favorite is the closer, wherein President Edgar Usher Poe, who got adopted by a different family, is president and delivers a cosmic-horror Gettysburg Address. Sounds like Poe, and also like Lincoln, except...cosmic-horror Lincoln, and that's honestly not a bad take: more or less the tone that his second inaugural, delivered only 17 months later, struck about the progress and meaning of the war. Looking forward to his other two books.

[Sebastian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The nostalgia breaking through Ludwigsen’s stories here is so strong that I was certain he is much older than he actually is. As it turns out, we are more or less of a generation, so I guess what we have here is more of a nostalgia for nostalgia, a wonderful second-level playfulness with stories and concepts touched only on the trailing end of their relevance. Nevertheless, this collection is like a really good run of the Twilight Zone, with no weak stories added to pad it up.

[SmokingMirror · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great name for a tv show of its type.

[Garp · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mix of several stories that are uneven. A few were interesting, a few not so much.

[Ian Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

What's another prison, man? I've been in them all my life. I like the one with the sky above it better, but sometimes that sky gets scary. That sky looks at you.

After two short but sweet collections of unusually diverse genre stories, Will Ludwigsen returns with something a shade more ambitious in his third, 'Acres of Perhaps'. It's named for an imagined anthology tv show in the vein of The Twilight Zone (but even stranger), as the writers and producers of said show find themselves in a weird tale of their own.

Unless I'm missing something obvious, only the first of three main stories (which collectively consume the lion's share of the word count) is directly related to the overall concept, with the others being miscellanea published in magazines and collected here much as with his previous collections.

Structurally, that strikes me as an odd and even disconcerting design choice, as though a prog rock band had recorded a concept record, and a bunch of unrelated singles, then smooshed them together as one album.

Interspersed between the three longer stories and two shorter ones are a number of 'episodes', consisting of brief plot summaries of supposed episodes of the titular show, plus recollections about the production, personality conflicts, network concerns etc.

Their function within the book is an unusual one. On the one hand, they're flavour text to flesh out the concept and perhaps to poke fun at real tv shows of the era. On another they're like 'flash fiction'. And then again, they read almost as self-parody on Ludwigsen's part, as stories too zany even for him to actually write. In that respect it's as though, whereas M.R. James did 'Stories I Have Tried to Write', Ludwigsen has done 'Stories I Have Decided Not to'.

Where Ludwigsen best establishes his unique voice is, to me, in his style of alternate history weird tales of real figures, and there are some crackers here. 'Poe at Gettysburg' is a delightfully bizarre vignette imagining Edgar Allan Poe as President of the United States. 'The Zodiac on the Moon' imagines the motivations of the Zodiac killer as tied to the Moon landings.

The best of the lot for my money, though, is 'Night Fever'. This convincingly renders a timeline whereby Charles Manson was free and active in New York in the 1970s, seducing followers, hanging out with celebrities like Truman Capote at the Studio 54 club, and causing murderous mayhem. Including the character of Leslie Van Houten as a journalist is a nifty artistic choice, also.

I think it's worth quoting Ludwigsen's note here. "If there's a point to the story, it's that blaming the Sixties for the Manson crimes is absurd - a person like that would use the tools of any era to assert his will, and there are always forgotten and isolated people to recruit." It's a penetrating insight, and indicative of his uncommon willingness to juxtapose the historical with the weird, which is also something he is able to execute to winning effect.

Will's work make not be prolific but it is ambitious and out of the ordinary. For that he can count me as an avid fan.