Brian Moore is often discussed as one of the last modern practitioners of fiction in the realist mode, and indeed realist is an apt description of most of his novels. In a handful of his works, however, he abandons the strictly mimetic in favor of the fantastic, with impressive results. Though he was thus not a writer of genre fantasy by any means, such excursions into another mode of fiction were hardly unusual for Moore, who throughout his career straddled the border between "popular" and "serious" fiction.

The straddling of borders, in fact, could be taken as a metaphor for Moore's life and career. Although he spent most of his life in North America, he wrote frequently about his native Northern Ireland. Much of his fiction is set in Canada, where he lived for eleven years, but he also wrote a fair amount about the United States, where...