Like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Spark presents her readers with strange and extraordinary events that disarm and, sometimes, exasperate. Though not quite magical realism, her technique in The Ballad of Peckham Rye is similar in that she makes use of the supernatural, the story contains events that are puzzling or inexplicable, and the novel often seems selfconscious about its own status as a fictional object.

Spark is relatively unconcerned in The Ballad of Peckham Rye with presenting a straightforward, "truthful" narrative. Instead, she often deliberately misleads the reader and makes matters more complex than need be. For example, Spark never definitely tells the reader whether Dougal Douglas is a devil or just an odd man. His "horns" may be real, or just cysts; he may have lost them in a fight or had them surgically removed; his "claw" and hump may be natural accoutrements for...