Small towns. Police chiefs. Resurrected dogs. Like TC Boyle, Jonathan Carroll is part history, part personal bard, but with an additional mixture of scifi and magical realism. The Wooden Sea is an excellent purview of what life in a small upstate New York town might be like if Neil Turoks physics were in charge of the town council. The lives of everyone and everything seem permeated across multiple dimensions with everything, and everyone, else. Carroll is an impressive writer with more than a few books out, kind of an author, more known amongst other writers than a broad public. If you haven't read him yet, The Wooden Sea is one of his strongest novels, although Bones of the Moon is a close second.