Few Vermonters are old enough to remember the summer of 1937, when sweltering temperatures and scant rainfall sparked a brief but intense fad of public nudity. It was started, surprisingly, by a Rutland minister who encouraged his flock to beat the heat in their birthday suits and “enter the world as God made them.”
Can’t recall that local history lesson? Then surely you’ve read about Tsar Island in Lake Champlain, which Russia’s Nicholas II won from a New York real estate tycoon in a 19th-century poker game and where his daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, lived briefly, surviving on local fish and game. Or perhaps you’ve heard the legend of Flight 666, which crashed near Lake Elmore in 1982 but left behind no survivors, bodies, rescuers or answers.
If you’re a local history buff scratching your head, welcome to The Vermont Extended Universe, a new historical fiction series by Shelburne author Chris Rodgers. On April 1, Rodgers dropped the second volume of his free online series of short stories, which feels like a blend of Green Mountain legends and “The X-Files.” Rodgers illustrates his campy, faux folklore with AI-generated imagery — think Civil War-era dinosaurs, Northeast Kingdom vampires and the “Hibernating Man,” who beds down each winter, ursine-like, in a windowless basement cave while his wife takes care of their children.
Framing the anthology is narration by Abigail George, an investigator charged with examining occasional leaks from an alternate reality known as the Vermont Extended Universe, or V.E.U. for short. George is motivated both by her professional duty and, like Fox Mulder of “The X-Files,” by her determination to find a lost sister — in this case, a sister trapped somewhere between the two universes.
The V.E.U. series is a side hustle for Rodgers, 49, a professional videographer, screenwriter, marketer and producer of TV commercials through his company, Forever Lucky Films. His clients have ranged from the Vermont National Guard to self-help guru Tony Robbins.
Rodgers moved to Vermont with his family in 2016 after reading a “36 Hours in Burlington, Vermont” feature in the New York Times, then visiting all of its recommendations. He occasionally writes from a tiny post-and-beam house in his backyard, which he won in a Shelburne Farmers Market raffle in 2021. The structure was delivered by the same tow truck driver who pulls stuck semis and RVs out of Smugglers’ Notch. (Yes, that’s a true story.)
“I’ve always been into slightly supernatural, slightly wonky and weird stories,” said Rodgers, who previously self-published two young adult books: Gross Potions, a Harry Potter-esque magical story he wrote in 2019 with his now-13-year-old twin boys; and this year’s A Little Too Dark, an anthology of creepy tales about a middle school in Kansas where the buses are haunted and the team mascots come alive.
Rodgers isn’t so much a Vermont history buff as he is a fan of the paranormal and the unexplained, such as the stories collected in Weird New England and other books by Windsor author Joe Citro. Rodgers grew up in Lindenwold, N.J., within walking distance of writer Walt Whitman’s summer home. When he was a kid, Rodgers’ parents took him and his brothers to the Whitman house to hear stories from local folklorists. Among their tales was the legend of the Jersey Devil, a mythical demon-like beast believed to haunt the New Jersey Pinelands. Rodgers wove the Jersey Devil into the first two volumes of The Vermont Extended Universe. He plans to publish four volumes, one representing each season.
“I don’t even believe in ghosts,” he said. “But if you can make the improbable believable, that’s the key.”
Asked whether any of his readers actually believes that Vermont’s Union soldiers kept pet dinosaurs, or that Lake Champlain was once home to a Statue of Prosperity taller than the Statue of Liberty, Rodgers laughed.
“If they do,” he said, “we’ve got to do some core education in this state.”