SPIRIT VALLEY RADIO

Mysterious radio broadcasts from the past are among the spooky goings-on roiling a corner of the Missouri Ozarks in this fantasy.

Tall’s novel centers on KSR, a pirate radio station whose Saturday-night broadcasts in the vicinity of Joplin, Missouri, feature uncannily accurate present-day weather forecasts, hit-parade songs, St. Louis Cardinals games from the 1960s, sermons of the long-dead Rev. Franklin L. Hewitt from the 1930s, and “air traffic control for a mysterious WWII airfield.” Federal agencies have tried and failed to locate and silence the station, whose signal seems to emanate from an area called the Spirit Valley, which includes an abandoned airstrip, the village of West Bobcat, a rain tank that amplifies a disembodied voice, a creepy forest, and invisible spirit beings known as Nunnehi in Cherokee legend. Tall’s narrative wanders back and forth over decades, telling the loosely integrated stories of characters around the Spirit Valley. They include Charles J. Howell, a Cherokee man who has visions of a spectral old man; his buddy E.J., who hires on a slate of untalented local musicians to scare tourists from his diner; Jake, a government paranormal investigator; Sylvie T., a teenage mind reader; Merlie, an unhoused woman in New York City who picks up KSR on her radio and is drawn to West Bobcat; and even a rooster. Tall’s yarn enfolds readers in a world of magical realism where supernatural occurrences and astral adventures are a prosaic part of life; one plangent arc follows the Rev. Franklin’s ghostly wanderings after his death in 1934, complete with socially awkward encounters with the living. Tall’s writing features colorful characters who stay grounded amid the supernaturalism and sly humor and prose whose deadpan matter-of-factness shades into poetry: “The ghosts were crazy in a big city. They paced overhead across long hallways; they lurked in laundry rooms and cried ‘Help me!’ They stared through walls and knew what you were doing.” The result is a fun tall tale that’s also a resonant meditation on the magic of an iconic American landscape.

A beguiling fable that’s full of rich whimsy with a thoughtful bite.