Northeastern professor Jeremy P. Bushnell’s debut novel is a quirky, wildly entertaining commentary on the state of the struggling young writer, and to accomplish it he didn’t even need a leg-up from any dark forces (that we know of). The Weirdness follows a downtrodden would-be fiction writer who awakes one morning in his Brooklyn apartment with a nasty hangover and a nastier visitor: the devil himself. Lucifer is ready to grant him a big book deal in exchange for a little favor. No success comes without cost, however, and Bushnell’s witty debut is a fine, slightly meta exploration of that bargain.