Many readers on opening Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban's extraordinary combination of quest romance, science fiction, linguistic experiment, and theological speculation, may feel the same confusion as its narrator-hero. For Hoban's is a complex story, being largely about how we interpret language and understand ourselves, "what the idear of us myt be." Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time. (p. 1)

The most pervasive myth [in the novel] … is the sacred Eusa Story. Hoban dextrously transforms the Christian legend of St. Eustace—who was converted by a vision of Christ standing with arms outstretched between the antlers of a stag—into an allegory of atomic energy. (pp. 1, 14)

What is marvelous in all this is the way Hoban makes us experience the uncanny familiarity of this world, while also making it a strange and animistic place...