Throughout his life, the American writer Russell Hoban produced a number of startlingly original novels. Perhaps the most startling of them all is “Riddley Walker,” first published in 1980. (Hoban died in 2011.)

The book belongs to the dystopian genre that has become fairly popular in recent decades. What makes it unlike any other is its language — a version of English as it might be spoken by people who had never seen words or place names written down, an idiom among the ruins of half-remembered scientific jargon, folklore and garbled history.

In the post-apocalyptic universe created by Hoban, words create ripples of meaning, echoes reaching into the heart of language and thought through a thick fog of cultural trauma and loss. People live in the shadows of the myth of Eusa, a character modeled after St. Eustace, the Roman general who, according to the legend, converted to Christianity after having a vision of Christ between the antlers of a stag.

In the myth, the ill-intentioned “Mr Clevver” encourages Eusa — whose name deliberately echoes “U.S.A.” — to hunt for the Addom that “runs in the wud,” the woods (but also the “would,” a reference to human desire and will). When Eusa finds the Addom (standing for both a split atom and a mortally wounded and divided “Adam”), he tears him apart, causing everything in the world to be devastated in a nuclear explosion.