Peace

Peace is a 1975 novel by the American writer Gene Wolfe and his first long-form work, originally published by Harper & Row. Set in a small Midwestern American town, the book is narrated in the first person by the elderly Alden Dennis Weer, who recounts the memories of his life—childhood, youth, and middle age through to old age. The narrator's consciousness often drifts beyond time and space, as if the story were being told from somewhere outside ordinary reality, and the paragraphs are linked by association rather than linear chronology. The novel contains numerous stories within stories, especially those Weer heard as a child; many key events are never explicitly narrated, and readers must infer them from hints and subtle clues embedded in these nested tales. For years critics have disagreed about what actually happens in the novel: one reading holds that the narrator is already dead and these scattered memories are a ghost's recollections; another holds that these old-age memories are the fantasies of a man broken in middle age. Wolfe himself confirmed in 2014 that the former ghost-narrator reading matched his intentions. He said Peace was his personal favorite among his own works, because in it he came closest to achieving what he had set out to do. Neil Gaiman has also praised the book repeatedly, saying that on a first reading it seems a gentle Midwestern memoir, and only on the second or third reading does it become a horror novel.