Stranger Things…but make it Lowell. That’s what you can expect from a new serial debuting next week from local author Ryder Jones.
Welcome to Westville is a paranormal novel that will be published weekly in 10 installments beginning on Oct. 25, 2024. Excepts will be shared on Fridays on Lowell’s First Look, and readers can find the rest of each installment on Jones’s Substack page.
Although less common now, serials have long been used to publish novels, and some of the most famous titles of all time – including A Tale of Two Cities and Crime and Punishment — were published in this format. Jones is hoping that after all installments of Welcome to Westville complete, the book can be published in a traditional format as well.
Dabbling in Writing from an Early Age
Jones is the creative director for Impact Church in Lowell, but he has been writing most of his life.
“I read a lot growing up, and I dabbled in writing throughout middle school and high school,” he says. Jones is a longtime resident of Lowell and graduated from Lowell High School with the Class of ’06.
As it turns out, Welcome to Westville isn’t the first time he’s written something inspired by Lowell. He recently came across a school project written in 5th grade in which he detailed radioactive creatures rising from Cherry Creek.
But it wasn’t until 2021 that his first novel began to take shape. “I was just taking a break from the workday,” he remembers, “(and) I took a few minutes to work on a scene.”
That scene turned into his first novel, one that Jones said he wrote for himself to see if he could “climb that hill.” Since then, he has finished three novels which he describes as practice books. They remain unpublished, but Jones would eventually like to share them with the world. His second book, Remnant Divine, includes a fantasy world that he’d like to explore more thoroughly in future titles.
But for now, he’s focused on getting Welcome to Westville to readers. “Write what you know” is common advice given to writers, and the subject matter here is something Jones knows very well.
Inspired by the People and Place of Lowell
Fantasy, science fiction and the paranormal world have long fascinated Jones
“I remember very vividly growing up as a kid in ‘90s, at 9pm, watching The X Files, intrigued and glued to the TV,” he says. “There is something about the unknown that draws you in.”
Welcome to Westville is written in the same vein as The X Files and Stranger Things. It’s about weird things happening in otherwise mundane locations. Jones describes the book synopsis as this:
“When a young girl vanishes, a haunted cop burdened by a past mistake finds himself entangled in the dark secrets lurking beneath Westville’s quiet facade. As the missing girl’s best friends embark on their own search, they uncover something malevolent and hungry stirring in the shadows of the woods.”
Westville is a stand-in for Lowell, and it’s hard to miss the connection between the two. There’s Prince Milling in Westville, but that’s hardly the only similarity to Lowell. Jones has interviewed various people around town, including the police chief and city clerk, to ensure accuracy in his book and capture the essence of small-town life here.
“I got some interesting little tidbits about different locales,” he says. And those will undoubtedly make their way into Welcome to Westville.
How to Read Welcome to Westville
Each Friday, Lowell’s First Look will publish an excerpt from the latest installment of Welcome to Westville along with a link to Jones’s Substack where you can read the rest.
Between installments, Jones hopes to publish different interactive elements – such as memos and notes – to supplement the novel. He hopes some of that will help inspire “water cooler conversations.” He may even use reader feedback to help craft parts of the story going forward.
The serial format harkens back to the old days of sitcoms and TV shows in which everyone was watching the same thing at the same time and then talking about it the next day. Jones hopes Welcome to Westville will help spur some of those same types of conversations.
We’ll have an excerpt from the first installment of Welcome to Westville next week. In the meantime, you can subscribe to Jones’s Substack and follow Welcome to Westville on Instagram and Facebook. This book is written for an older audience, and parental discretion is advised. Check out the book trailer below.
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