Everything you need to understand or teach Love & Sleep by John Crowley.
The Prologue of the novel contains a passage we later discover to be written by Fellowes Kraft, a historical novelist Pierce Moffet read devotedly in his youth. "Once," writes Kraft, "the world was not as it has since become. Once it worked in a way different from the way it works now; its very flesh and bones, the physical laws that governed it, were ever so slightly different from the ones we know...