Laura van den Berg gets all that. A native of the Sunshine State, the novelist and short-story writer has made her birthplace integral to much of her work. Across several story collections and, now, three novels, van den Berg has presented Florida not as a freak-show meme generator but as a serious place, populated by authentic figures with recognizably human concerns. Relationships bend and break for familiar reasons in her stories, and when circumstances turn extraordinary, her characters respond to them in credible fashion.

Where things get weird in van den Berg’s Florida is where they would get weird in stories set anyplace. The supernatural, or the suggestion of it, coats her tales like so much humidity. Sometimes, her characters encounter actual ghosts. Other times, as she told the magazine Poets & Writers in 2020, she comes “at the haunting from an unexpected angle,” with a “sideways ghost story” where “the haunting is more a state of being, both in the self and in the surrounding world.”

Van den Berg’s new novel, “State of Paradise,” unites these approaches, crafting a macabre tale in which the living interact with the dead and yet the eeriest souls are those with a pulse. For the spooked protagonists of her previous novels, “Find Me” and “The Third Hotel,” Florida served as a symbol of escape and a source of disquieting memories, respectively. “State of Paradise” is the first book by van den Berg, who lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, to take place entirely inside the peninsula, and it establishes her as one of Florida’s sharpest observers.

Like fellow Florida native Karen Russell, van den Berg understands that the state’s true character — the source of all that supposed weirdness — lies not in its residents’ propensity for mayhem, corruption and absurdity, but in the close and often perilous connection they have to the natural world. “In Florida, dangers don’t reveal themselves until it’s too late,” a character says in van den Berg’s 2020 collection “I Hold a Wolf by the Ears.” “The alligator lurking in the shallow pond, ready to devour your pet or your child. The snake hidden in the underbrush. The riptide slicing across that postcard-perfect Atlantic. Sinkholes. Encephalitis. Brain-destroying bacteria that flourish in overheated lakes. Quicksand.”

These are not exaggerations. Florida is, after all, a state with a major highway called Alligator Alley and a county known as the shark bite capital of the world. “Sometimes I can’t believe a place like this exists,” the narrator’s non-Floridian husband says in “State of Paradise.” Writers have been riffing on sentiments like that from about the time of the first manatee sighting. Too many, though, have leaned so far into the idea that they can’t see around the unbalanced, funhouse-mirror Florida that exists only for those who buy into the distortions.

“State of Paradise” is not without fantastical detours, but much of it feels real enough. The narrator, a 36-year-old ghostwriter for “a very famous thriller author” she’s never met, is stuck in central Florida after returning from Upstate New York to care for her ailing father. Shortly after his death, a covid-like pandemic erupted, claiming an untold number of people, erasing the husband’s university job back home and causing “curious physical symptoms” in the survivors.

Horrors pile up: The narrator’s outie belly button becomes an innie that grows deep enough to hold a bar of soap. Her sister experiences changes in eye color she insists are not happening. Their mother becomes a leader in the “voluntary human extinction movement.” (“HONK IF YOU THINK PEOPLE ARE THE PROBLEM,” one of their signs reads.) Relatives believed to be dead may be coming back.

Meanwhile, during quarantine, a state-sanctioned Miami tech company distributed free, virtual reality headsets in an “alleged act of public service.” Told the devices would help the homebound fend off loneliness, users of the addictive MIND’S EYE begin disappearing without a trace.

Florida’s mendacious leaders only darken the nightmare. The regressive governor, “who bears a striking resemblance to a Cro-Magnon in a suit,” declares the pandemic over and assures residents that life will return to normal. He dismisses reports of swamp-based militias formed by his supporters, and signs into law a public-schools bill that replaces American history lessons with Bible studies. “This is what it feels like to break free from tyranny,” he claims. A reader doesn’t need to don lifts to see the character’s real-world inspiration.

“State of Paradise” is the second novel van den Berg has set during a pandemic. Her first, 2015’s “Find Me,” concerns a grisly, brain-eating virus that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans in a matter of weeks. Given its pre-covid creation, the pandemic in “Find Me” seems more shocking and less inevitable than the one in “State of Paradise.” While the contagion certainly upends her life, the new novel’s narrator, a recovering alcoholic, has spent many years living close to “the feeling of being lost in a vast wilderness — wandering and wandering until you get so tired all you want is to lie down and sleep.” Florida’s stormy summer weather, meanwhile, has conditioned her for “a regular feeling of apocalypse.” As outrageous as its effects may be, the pandemic happens in “State of Paradise” simply because pandemics happen. The world is always ending, after all.

By the close of the novel, once-hidden dangers of the fascistic variety are increasingly slithering around in the open. Travel advisories warn against visiting Florida. The state has become “the first point on the map that appears to be in the early stages of some kind of dissolution,” van den Berg writes. “Whether it is temporary or permanent remains to be seen.”

Why, then, would anyone want to spend the end times in Florida? Van den Berg wisely allows her narrator no easy answer to that question, but it’s in Florida that the character remains. As the virus recedes, she’s also left in a position very much like our own, stranded between the world she knows and the world she thought she knew.

“One of the weirdest things about this period of time is the parts that still seem normal,” she says. “Mundane and non-apocalyptic.”

Jake Cline is a writer and editor in Miami.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 224 pp. $27