Description:

Part Appalachian gothic, part science fiction, part Norwegian western, The Calf is a darkly comic backwoods phantasmagoria that bends genres until they break in a feat of linguistic experimentation.

In a subterranean office labyrinth somewhere in Hadeland, Norway, a mechanical barn gnome with a metal bucket for a head spends his days shredding paper, brewing coffee, and trying to forget a certain late summer night in the woods sometime in the 1980s. That night—hazy, mythic, traumatic—centers on the Mare Cooter Canyon and a ragtag bunch of teenage boys calling themselves "the cowboys." As the narrator's memory crackles and sputters, we encounter grotesque archetypes: a resurrected Christ-like figure called the Dead Feller, a mysterious, moon-faced woman who may be an employment caseworker, and a strange, amorphous alien called the Calf. What happened out there, and who—or what—is telling the story?

Drawing on the...