[In] 1979, nearly a quarter of a century after its conception, "In Evil Hour" appears at last in English, thereby filling in the last significant gap in the García Márquez opus. Given its wit, perception, imaginative richness and easy accessibility, it is astonishing that we have had to wait so long….

[With "In Evil Hour"] young García Márquez, moving away from the experimental fantasy and lyricism of his early stories toward his own sense of "social realism," chose to transpose his tale of the lampoons into the contemporary Colombian reality [of civil war], in this way interlacing a comic craziness with a terrible one.

When the novel opens, the unnamed "village"—which, in spite of some superficial similarities and even a contradiction or two, is not the famous Macondo—has been experiencing a period of enforced and artificial "peace," this peace being useful to the...