By Thomas Wharton, with illustrations by Wesley Bates. Gaspereau Press, 236 pp, $27.95, softcover.

Trust Thomas Wharton to come up with a novel subtitled A Bibliography of Imaginary Books. As well as an endless parade of made-up texts, we have a series of untrustworthy narrators and nomadic plots. It's a hyperdistillation of Wharton's last, Salamander, and a lovely creation.

It's also a lovely physical object, a paperback wrapped in a French-flapped dust jacket encased in a cardboard slipcase, which is emblematic of Wharton's fractal style of storytelling. At the centre of The Logogryph is a meeting between the nameless young narrator and the Weavers, exotic newcomers to the village of Jasper (setting of Wharton's first novel, the award-winning Icefields). The boy falls for young Holly Weaver, who later turns to drugs and partying after the death of her brother. Holly's mother divests the family of a carton of the dead son's books, discarded worlds into which the boy escapes and from which, we infer, he never really emerges again.

Interpenetrating snippets suggest the boy becomes a writer, and it is Wharton's skittering talent that we piece together a (haunted) life out of mythology, an excerpt from the index of a lost book, an account of the rules of tarot's lost cousin, and multiple descriptions of the incantatory experience of reading. A short novella embedded in The Logogryph suggests the exponential reach of small books like this very one: "Because it is so brief, and within its few pages so much is connected, each entry, each word seems a super-dense kernel of matter which must be carefully analyzed, weighed, examined from all angles, before one can confidently proceed to the next. In consequence, this narrative built of sparrow's bones, compact and delicate, seems to take forever to finish."

Funny, eerie, academic, absurd, The Logogryph is similarly paradoxical, and though its end arrives all too quickly, the reverberations of its passing will abate only slowly.