I first met Ted Morrissey in planning talks for a collaborative writers' workshop series involving the University of Illinois Springfield, the Vachel Lindsay Association, and the Pharmacy, a grassroots art center in Springfield, Illinois; and I first read Men of Winter perhaps a month later in preparation for an interview with Ted for the Lincoln Land Review, the literary journal of the community college where I worked as an adjunct. [The Lincoln Land Review interview is on YouTube. Find links to this and other interviews by visiting tedmorrissey.com/interviews.]

In a sense, it was assigned reading, so I felt relatively little initial investment in the act of reading the book. At the time, I had only modest expectations for local writers in general. But having come to know Ted through our workshop planning, I knew him to be both passionate and deliberate in his outlook on writing, and to retain a sense of the fun and discovery in it. Men of Winter, I thought, would be a fair read.

"Fair" was a gross underestimation. Within the first page, I was charmed by Hektr Pastrovich's description of Helena. Its contrast of snow-white skin and long, black hair, its figure of "a child traveling alone to meet a guardian aunt ... in the country" (ch. 1) called to mind a mélange of classic fairy tales; and against that fanciful backdrop, the "geometric shape, something like a star" in Helena's intricate braids seemed unequivocally to mark her from the beginning as something magical, or celestial, or divine.

That seeming assurance is Morrissey's great strength as author. In fact, Morrissey is persistently equivocal throughout Men of Winter, preferring to maintain ambiguity, never fully answering the question of Helena's true nature. Or that of the vagrant "Prince of Ithaka," for that matter. Everything these characters do, from beguiling a pension of boarders to life, mirth, and fecundity, even to dispatching a barn full of trained soldiers with bow and arrow and obscured line of sight, is at least plausible from a real-life perspective, however fantastic in effect. In fact, the very language of Morrissey's descriptions of characters and events serves simultaneously to suggest and to disclaim supernatural essence. "He looked at me accusingly, as if I had done this...via some dark art" (ch. 20).

This technique of equivocation allows reader response to shape the narrative, but then it does more: it serves as a microcosm of a larger motif of tergiversation and a theme of liminality. Hektr's conflict of commitment between Mezenskya's newspaper and The Nightly Observer is a conflict between credibility and sensationalism – between journalistic duty and integrity on the one hand, manifest in Hektr's warfront reporting assignment beyond Iiloskova, and circulation and money, fame and fortune, on the other, manifest in his pursuit of the elusive backstory of the Prince of Ithaka. It is a conflict Hektr never definitively resolves; he not only serves both masters from beginning to end, but he leverages the resources and opportunities provided by one paper to aid his pursuit of a story for the other, softening the demarcation between the two.

Many readers will have noticed that Men of Winter in many ways evokes and alludes to Homer's Odyssey. Although Morrissey has taken care to ensure that even readers unfamiliar with Homer can understand and enjoy Men of Winter as a story in its own right, the novel is much enriched by a familiarity with the Odyssey's plot and characters. Helena corresponds to Helen of Troy, daughter of Zeus, and the Prince of Ithaka corresponds to Odysseus himself, the Greek king of Ithaca.

For those who recognize the trace of Homer in Men of Winter, Hektr's conflict of commitment between two writing assignments invites comparison to Morrissey's own administration of two seemingly disparate literary tasks – the rendering of a revisionist treatment of the Odyssey and the creation of an original work – and by extension, perhaps even exploration of his process and motivations. Does the author view original writing as low-circulation, low-visibility work in contrast to the relative prominence of the classics, and revisions and treatments thereof? Or is it vice versa? Or some hybrid? Or something else entirely? Does he view one task as his quotidian slog, "put[ting] bread on [his] table" (ch. 1), and the other as an enticing diversion? Answers are necessarily subjective and speculative, but the questions are engaging and generative.

Readers may also note that, while characters and elements of Men of Winter correspond to characters and elements of the Odyssey, the book is not a direct conversion. The Cyclops Polyphemus is embodied at one point in the eye of a storm, at another in the spunk of a cigar. Morrissey's redubbing the King of Ithaca as the Prince of Ithaka intimates to his audience that if he is retelling the Odyssey, he is telling it slant. Perhaps it is that, like Hektr graying the line between his newspaper assignments, Morrissey is blurring the generic boundary between original and derivative and creating a transformative twilight zone on the order of a musical mashup. He creates his own genre – or if Polyphemus were to ask, no-genre.

Every reader takes something different away from a book, and the complex nature of Morrissey's novel likely admits of even more divergent, individualized response than do most books. Men of Winter elegantly combines the active literary study evinced in fictional revisionism with the original literary contribution of a novel, while at the same time highlighting the connection between plot and author experience. It is a rich, genre-challenging work that raises stimulating questions, and a valuable addition to a classroom reading list or personal collection.