In this well-informed, logically structured study, David A. Norris offers a lucid and original interpretation of important and influential Serbian narrative fiction between the demise of Tito in 1980 and the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Chapter 1 summarizes how the communist mandate over the form, style, and thematics of literature was ideologically monopolized through writers’ responsibility to patriotically celebrate the Partisan collective cultural ethic, dominant 1944–52. Norris explains the political myth of the post-WWII liberalization of Party control over the production and circulation of literary meanings, 1952–84. Seeing Thomas Eekman's claim that the new cultural policy beginning in the 1950s brought “enormous relief” as overgenerous (Thirty Years of Yugoslav Literature, 1945–1975, 1978, 12), Norris convincingly documents how mechanisms of constraint continued to be exercised over literature.

In Chapter 2, Norris discusses the politics of literature according to two “kinds” of Serbian literary identity—in the socialist context, 1943–80, and in the nationalist context, 1991–the present. He considers the 1980s a transitional period of experimental national fiction and critiques scholars who assign primacy to the sociological influence of fictional texts on the broader history of political events and who offer a version of the Serbian national narrative that is most interested in themes of WWII, victim psychology, and suffering. More concerned with the semantics of thematic diversity, Norris references Lubomir Doležel's theory of fictional worlds and Predrag Palavestra's concept of “critical literature.”

Norris divides Serbian fiction into the post-Tito period of Socialist Yugoslavia and a second period that includes Wars of Yugoslav Succession, 1991–95, and the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. The fiction from both periods is interpreted in two chapters each. History is treated first symbolically in Chapter 3, then semantically in Chapter 4. War is interpreted first symbolically in Chapter 5, then semantically in Chapter 6. Finally, Chapter 7 explores both the symbolic facts of the bombing of Serbia and the semantic fictions of the eerie twilight zone in which writers found themselves as both objects and subjects of the history and war brought home at the end of the decade.

Chapter 3 sees the 1980s as a time of exhuming the signs and stories of the past, as in the summoning of unburied specters from the karst pits of Croatian Krajina in Jovan Radulović’s story collection Dove Hole. Norris describes in detail how local memories are stirred and haunted by discovered ghostly bones of Serbian villagers’ unsettled souls leaving the atrocious site of their execution during WWII in order to be interred half a century late. Analyzing Slobodan Selenić’s novel Heads or Tails, he interprets how literature after Tito began to deal with the past's unfinished business and put the lie to “Brotherhood and Unity.” Norris completes this period with Svetlana Velmar-Janković’s stories in Dorćol: The Names of the Streets, which reach into the pre-socialist era to interpret the lives of prominent figures in the nation's political and cultural past as ephemeral presences powerless to relieve the present burden of national history.

Chapter 4 examines ways in which historical memory is articulated through a range of uncanny motifs, referring to Sigmund Freud's psychological and Tzvetan Todorov's structuralist considerations of how a sense of unexpected unease is used in fiction to suggest normally impossible worlds. Norris elaborates these in considering the oneiric histories of Danilo Kiš’s Encyclopedia of the Dead, in the unremembered history of Antonise Isaković’s controversial novel about the island prison camp Goli Otok, Instant 2, and in the shattering unsettlements of uncanny borders relayed in Radoslav Bratić’s Picture without Father.

Norris turns to consider the nationalist period of Serbian fiction created in the 1990s in the post-communist state in Chapter 5, when events and experiences are played out symbolically against the conventions of war fiction, as seen in the chapter's metaphorical title: In the Shadow of War. Norris is particularly convincing in thinking about the place of WWII in war fiction from the 1990s. He explains that Serbian WWII narratives could not, unlike in the west, function as an underlayer of a hallowed past precisely because the new Serbian war fiction of the 1990s was concerned with discrediting the myths of Partisan heroism. Velmar-Janković’s The Abyss and Selenić’s novel Premeditated Murder exemplify this topic.

In Chapter 6, Norris turns to consider the multiplicity of literary meanings presented as subliminal conceptual worlds. He surveys scholarly literature about Freud's term unheimlich to explain a particular form of the uncanny—unhomeliness—a binary reality in which war haunts on a level of supernatural threat beyond the battlefield. Here he analyzes in detail Vladimir Pištalo's short story “The Grenade” and Vladimir Arsenijević’s bestselling novel In the Hold—which he relates to the sociological theory of urbicide. He evaluates the work's structural organization of the hostilities in terms of the melodramatic triviality of a family “soap opera,” the novel's subtitle.

Chapter 7 ties together Norris's conceptualization of Serbia haunted in fictional representations of history and war, playing on the ghostly metaphorics and semantics of the country's very different historical experience of war in 1999. Đorđe Pisarev's novel In the Shadow of the Kite represents different experiences of unresolved social violence through a postmodern technique that parodies how war can be fictionally narrated on different intergenerational and socio-psychic levels. Norris understands Pisarev's challenge to the mimetic conventions of anti-war literature, specifically in fiction that expresses the symbolic ghostly reality of NATO's phantom and stealth aircraft. Overshadowed by dragon kite apparitions from the sky, the novel's conscript protagonist is not a stouthearted analogue-epic defender of the homeland but a fragile, mortally exposed juvenile player in a raptorial digital game. Following on Linda Hutcheon's description of parody, Norris defines this as a shift of representations that reveals and transfers a semiotic code into a new context. He concludes with references to narrative fiction theory (Viktor Shklovsky's formalist concept of defamiliarization, Mikhail Bakhtin's thinking about carnival humor, Wolfgang Kayser's description of the grotesque) to assert that both the frightening relief of laughter and the cynical feeling of pent up apocalyptic dread manifest the sense of uncanniness that informs Serbian narrative prose at the end of the millennium.