When Steven Hall says he's launching his debut novel The Raw Shark Texts (HarperCollinsCanada, $34.95) later this month in Toronto, he really means it. But unlike most writers, his launch involves a boat. And not just any boat, but a faithful re-creation of the Orpheus, the quasi-magical vessel that takes the book's characters out hunting the beast of the title.

This is complicated. The shark is not so much animal as concept. And the boat? Well, in the book it starts life as an assemblage of boxes and computer parts, but it becomes so much more. Talking to a sort of metaphysical explorer, protagonist Eric Sanderson is unconvinced. "'But it's just–' 'Yes, I heard you the first time. You're quite correct. It's just stuff, just beautiful ordinary things. But the idea these things embody, the meaning we've assigned to them in putting them together like this, that's what's important.' I looked at the assortment of wood and boxes and cardboard and wires. 'This is another conviction thing, isn't it?'"

Conviction fuels this book, which is surely one of the most inventive and original novels of the year. On the line from his home in Hull, England, the author speaks about the importance of belief in the thrillerlike tale of Eric's quest to understand why his memory has disappeared, where his girlfriend has vanished to, and why a ferocious conceptual shark is intent on killing him. (Unless the whole story is happening inside his head.) "A lot of it is about his [Eric's] ability to commit to those ideas," Hall says, with a light Mancunian accent. "Whether you see it as kind of an ascent or a descent depends on how you read the book. But every so often he's presented with various leaps of faith, which he either makes or doesn't, and the story changes accordingly.”¦And like I say, it's down to the reader whether that's kind of an ascent out of blankness towards what he always wanted or a descent into madness."

Hall–trained as a visual artist–is big on reader involvement. "I love books that give you space to climb inside there. And you have to run to keep up in places, and you have to fill in a lot of blanks yourself. So it almost becomes your story." This would be why the title is a play on the Rorschach test, the psychological puzzle that generates feedback from indeterminate blotches. Hall says one of his novel's purposes is to recontextualize the everyday; this is in keeping with the authors he says he loves, especially Haruki Murakami, Paul Auster, and Mark Danielewski. "I think there's a danger of becoming too familiar with things, isn't there? That you kind of, when you're used to seeing the same things every day, you see those things come what may, and you don't see maybe the interesting things just slightly out of view behind them."

This is of course only one way to read the slippery novel. He's happy to claim the opposite as well: "As you go through the book," he says, "hopefully things start to seem more and more familiar. And by the time you get to the end, you know, it's very much almost recognizably Jaws."

Spooky or cerebral, The Raw Shark Texts glides from the darkest depths up to a glittering surface. Will readers be able to keep up? Like the "boat" Hall will construct in the Toronto art gallery in the coming weeks, it will depend on a big leap of faith.