Will Ludwigsen's stories of strange mystery have appeared in eclectic venues like Asimov's Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Weird Tales, Nightmare Magazine, and The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, among many places. His previous collection, In Search Of and Others, was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award.
Will lives and writes in Jacksonville, Florida, with his partner Aimee Payne, also a writer. When he isn't reconciling the eerie with the absurd as a marketing writer at work, he's doing it for you in his fiction.
Creepy late-night television shows. Disco-dancing mass murderers. Sky-gazing psychopaths. Cursed pirate treasure. Haunted presidents. They await all those brave and curious enough to venture among the Acres of Perhaps, the strangest television show you've never heard of.
•Discovering Ludwigsen is like discovering an extra limb you never knew you had, one that's full of secrets and irresistible mysteries. His stories will take you very far indeed from the beaten path, so far that you may find yourself lost if you aren't careful…but the experience will be bizarrely rewarding in ways you can't quite put your finger on. This collection is a wonderful starting point for your own personal journey into the ways of weird, presenting you with extraordinary tales of characters and situations that are likely to leave you with haunting aftereffects. Tune in for the mass murderers who love disco dancing; stay for the pirate treasure with an unforgettable curse. Ludwigsen will never let you off the hook when it comes to things that will likely make you uncomfortable—or force you to glimpse the darkness within the best and brightest aspects of your world and existence. – Robert Jeschonek
"Evocative tales of alternate realities steeped in the ethos of Shirley Jackson and Ray Bradbury."
– Kirkus Reviews"Dark, fun, surprisingly moving collection of what-if stories. I was thoroughly charmed by this book. Will rocks."
– Paul Tremblay, author of The Pallbearers Club"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. This is a wonderfully inventive and unpredictable collection that every fan of horror or short stories should read."
– Jack Haringa, author and editor"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."
– A.C. Wise, author"Will Ludwigsen asks 'What if?' like no one else, and his answers are full of wonder that aches with authenticity and bittersweet nostalgia. This is masterful storytelling for fans of literary and genre fiction alike."
– Michael Wehunt, author of Greener PasturesIf you were a certain kind of person with a certain kind of schedule in the early 60s, you probably saw a show that some friends of mine and I worked on called Acres of Perhaps. By "certain kind of person," I mean insomniac or alcoholic; by "certain kind of schedule," I mean awake at 11:30 at night with only your flickering gray-eyed television for company.
With any luck, it left you feeling that however weird your life was, it could always be weirder. Or at least more ironic. We would have settled for that in those earnest days.
They have conventions about our show where I bloviate on stage about what the aliens represented or how hard it was to work with Claude Akins or what we used to build the Martian spaceships. Graduate students write papers with titles like "Riding the Late Night Fantastic: Acres of Perhaps and the Post-War American Para-Consciousness." I'm now an ambassador for the show and for my friends, and I'm the worst possible choice.
I wasn't the one with the drive to create big things like our producer Hugh Kline, and I damned well wasn't the one with the vision and the awe like David Findley. I was just Barry Weyrich, the guy who wrote about spacemen in glass bubble helmets, who put commas in everyone's scripts, who never had writer's block, who grimaced whenever they talked about "magic."
And if there's anyone to blame for the shriveling death of that show's magic, it's me.
