In his three decades of running Mystery Hill, a roadside attraction where water famously flows upwards, Vietnam veteran Ken Kassarjian believes he's seen it all: conspiracy theorists who think he's a shape-shifting alien, crusading debunkers who think he's a fraud, stoned local teenagers who plague his minigolf course after hours. And as if the business of operating a tourist trap isn't weird enough, there are the strange critters running around in the woods, and the malevolent doings of the neighbours, the Boswells, Boozy by name and decidedly boozy by nature. Their latest moonshine: alien tea, anyone? Whatever precarious equilibrium Ken might have found in his oasis of gravitational eccentricity goes out the window with the appearance of Fara Oussemitski, a physics professor with her own ideas about what makes Mystery Hill tick. When she turns up one morning with a van full of instruments, Ken starts to discover that not only is Mystery Hill stranger than he had imagined, it's stranger than he could have imagined.
Author
Alexander C. Irvine is an American fantasist and science fiction writer. He also writes under the pseudonym Alex Irvine. He first gained attention with his novel A Scattering of Jades and the stories that would form the collection Unintended Consequences. He has also published the Grail quest novel One King, One Soldier, and the World War II-era historical fantasy The Narrows. In addition to his original works, Irvine has published Have Robot, Will Travel, a novel set in Isaac Asimov's positronic robot milieu; and Batman: Inferno, about the DC Comics superhero. His academic background includes an M.A. in English from the University of Maine and a PhD from the University of Denver. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maine. He also worked for a time as a reporter at the Portland Phoenix.
