Tucked on a hillside near where I live, there’s an old manor house that’s slowly being absorbed by the woods. Its crumbling stone walls are covered in a tangle of vines. Some of the doors have tipped off their hinges. The decomposing roof is thick with moss.

Every time I drive by it, I am reminded of how majestic the house is and imagine the history it must hold. I think about what its walls have seen — marriages and divorces, births and deaths. Most of all, I wonder about its abandonment. What sort of circumstances could’ve led to its decay?

It’s this curiosity-piquing cocktail of mystery and wonderment that Daniel Mason’s “North Woods” taps into with equal parts whimsy and aplomb. A verdant and impressively varied portrait of one Western Massachusetts cottage and its inhabitants over some four centuries, from the untapped wilds of the 16th century to the habitat-disappearing present, the novel reads like a treatise on forest management (and mismanagement), a hallucinatory dream sequence, and an anthropologist’s life’s work all rolled into one — with an ample helping of unruly ghosts.

In 12 loosely connected chapters and nearly 400 gorgeously imagined pages written over the course of a year, Mason, an assistant professor at Stanford University whose “A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth” was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, introduces us to a menagerie of cottage inhabitants, each with a backstory more inviting — and more unexpected — than the next.

There’s the pair of lovers fleeing from a repressive Puritan village who, after running through “groves hollowed by fire, with high green vaults of celestial scale” and lush, stream-dappled glens, settle in a valley clearing and lay the cabin’s first stone.

Or the twin spinster sisters who, after their British colonist father’s death, manage the house and sprawling orchard he planted. It’s in this period that the novel takes its first surprising and deliciously macabre turn when Mary, the dowdier of the two, takes matters into her own hands (literally) after Alice lifts her skirts for one too many potential suitors.

A raucous section involving a seance conducted by “circus mystic” Anastasia Rossi and the hoity-toity Farnsworths, who cleared the orchard for a croquet court and turned the cottage into a taxidermy-bedecked “sportsman’s paradise,” ends in another unforeseen twist. Here, it’s Rossi’s perpetually heaving bosom, offset by button magnate Karl Farnsworth’s pot-bellied blustering and his batty, “pale as porcelain” wife’s complaints about two male ghosts engaging in “psalmody” at all hours, that warrants spectacle.

But Mason’s talents don’t just lie in charismatic storytelling or picture-perfect sentences. (His description of ice, for example: “the sleet that falls like hissing sand, the white that coats the roads like baker’s dustings, the crystalline mesh, thin as spun sugar, that shatters with the passing of my hand.”)

He plays with form and timing too. Alongside a smattering of poems, a psychiatrist’s notes about a schizophrenic houseguest (“Case Notes on Robert S.”), and gruesome true crime dispatches from the property (“Murder Most Cold”), the particularly lovely though tragic tale of a friendship turned forbidden romance between renowned landscape painter and resident William Henry Teale and author Erasmus Nash is relayed through letters. As the correspondences from Teale to his paramour get shorter and more guarded, we suspect the worst, and it’s only through snippets in later stories that we find out what really happened.

With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell’s fiction (“Cloud Atlas”), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, “North Woods” fires on all cylinders by engaging all the senses as it transports readers through history.

Frankly, I’d follow Mason’s writing wherever it takes me next, even though this time — miraculously — he stayed in the same spot.

Alexis Burling is a freelance writer.