LEWISTON — Sun journal reporter Mark LaFlamme wants the truth.

He wants to know who killed JFK and exactly what goes on beyond the gates of Area 51. He wants to know where Jimmy Hoffa went and what really led to the terror of 9/11.

The Waterville native figures we are all entitled to the answers. If someone won’t provide them, he’ll just make them up.

And so comes “Box of Lies,” a new collection of fiction filled with speculation and curiosity gone mad. LaFlamme’s quest for knowledge transcends the earthly as he seeks the truth about creation, the afterlife and the very nature of our existence.

A mind reader sucks thoughts from both the living and the dead. A doctor discovers that the answers to all great questions might await in the grave. A professor suggests that we all may be nothing more than someone else’s work of fiction, and then sees horrifying evidence of his theory.

In “Box of Lies,” LaFlamme presents a bleak future, where men and women are forced to walk for their daily bread, old people play games with ghastly prizes and the end of the world doesn’t guarantee a way out.

A freak storm leaves half the population speaking gibberish, heaven may not be a permanent state and the tiniest decisions you make could influence the future in giant ways.

Then there’s the title story in which LaFlamme places the burden of the truth in the hands of one man, a washed out soldier named Ernest Brush who knows it all and suffers because of it.

Mark LaFlamme, the Maine Press Association’s 2006 Journalist of the Year, is a reporter and columnist at the Sun Journal. His weekly column, “Street Talk,” has been named Best in State and Best in New England. LaFlamme is the author of novels “The Pink Room,” “Vegetation,” “Asterisk: Red Sox 2086” and “Dirt: An American Campaign.”