Time and heartbreak unfold in a corner of Cape Cod

John HADLEY built the little house on Cape Cod with the help of his sons more than two centuries ago. Not much more than a cabin, it was tucked away in a hollow so that the family couldn’t see the ocean and the danger it held, though it lay just a mile away. John had always been a fisherman, but now he planned to become a farmer. His beloved wife, Coral, needed her husband home safe and sound.

Still, “[i]f a man in these parts needed to earn enough to buy fences and cows and turnips, he knew where he had to go,” Alice Hoffman (“The Probable Future,” “Practical Magic”) tells us in the opening tale of “Blackbird House,” her riveting collection of linked short stories. “It would only be from May to July, John figured, and that would be the end of it, especially if he was helped by his two strong sons.”

Hoffman’s 12 haunting tales unfold on this same piece of land over the course of the ensuing 200 years, the characters all inhabiting the simple house Hadley has built. But more than shared geography, it is Hoffman’s masterful air of foreboding that binds the stories together, the sense that things are about to go wretchedly, eternally wrong.

Each tale builds on the previous one, as generation follows generation and the house is sold into different hands. The era moves from the days of the Colonists through the Civil War, the Depression, the Holocaust, the post-Vietnam era and up to the current day. Each family occupying the home brings distinct dreams and disappointments.

Yet the heartbreaks they encounter -- and no one is exempt from the clouds of misfortune she summons upon her characters -- are due not to a curse upon the house or ruinous bad luck, but simply to human nature. Life is beautiful and heart-rending, her tales remind us, often in quick succession.

“One day everything was the same, the same sky and sea and beach, and the next day it was another world entirely,” says Violet, the narrator of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” upon meeting the man she loves, who will soon abandon her for her more comely sister. This sense of before and after, of life being divided into a time when dreams still flourished and the bleak aftermath following their demise, is present in all of the tales, as is a kind of superhuman love sometimes so strong that even the course of life itself seems to be swayed by its obstinate strength.

Superstition and elements of magical realism pepper the tales, lending a degree of the metaphysical to what might otherwise be overly bleak. The white blackbird always near the house through the centuries, for instance, is said to be the pet bird of little Isaac, the 10-year-old son from the first story. In “The Token,” the story of a wife gone mad after the death of her husband, we learn that the recently deceased had earlier lost his leg at sea. “The halibut had bitten off his leg, and for years after, my father would spit up fish teeth that had been left in his skin,” says daughter Ruby, the story’s young narrator. “They were cool when you touched them, like ice, like glass.” To Hoffman’s credit, these supernatural elements fit easily and are as natural in her narratives as a sea serpent in fisherman lore.

Though she mines abundant misfortune in “Blackbird House,” all is not tragic. The beauty and constancy of the land, made fruitful by its humble inhabitants -- the turnips sowed by John Hadley, the sweet peas Coral favored, the pear tree, bearing fruit as red as blood, planted by the next fateful set of residents -- remain, allowing the characters to leave an indelible mark upon the land.

And perhaps, these tales suggest, leaving such marks, the result of richly lived and fiercely loved lives, is the most any of us can hope for.