Post: A Fable

Fiction. Manhattan has been turned into the Perpetual Parking Plaza in an effort to thwart terrorism. The culprit is Kimball Lyon, New York's late governor. There are plenty of objections to his ruinous urban redevelopment. A hapless special investigator, B. Smith (who constantly reintroduces himself as I, B. Smith), trying to search out the rebels, ends up at a crumbling Civil War-era castle in the middle of the Hudson River where he finds Leo Post, a writer, son-in-law of the late governor. Post is an enigma with a connection to, among other things, the long-extinct passenger pigeon. Part mystery, part environmental elegy, POST combines eccentric meta-fiction and magical realism in a riotous futuristic fable. Hilary Master's POST—instead of the misbegotten parking plaza—may just be "the best defense against terrorism" we've got.