Dyer casts himself as “Stalker’s” stalker; getting there, as cruise lines used to advertise, is half the fun. “We are in another world that is no more than this world perceived with unprecedented attentiveness,” he writes, and his own close attention is admirable. Taking pains to nail the feel of Tarkovsky’s locations (“the echoey, intestinal, glass-strewn, stalactite-adorned tunnel”), Dyer recounts the film’s story from first shot to last, while supplying his own chatty annotations. In addition to waxing confessional, he conjures the filmmaker’s formidable personality. Tarkovsky was a perfectionist. The script for “Stalker” went through countless rewrites and, according to Dyer’s account, was largely reshot after faulty film processing ruined half the footage. Tarkovsky suffered a heart attack while “Stalker” was in postproduction, and he had courted catastrophe from the get-go. Originally, the film was to be shot in the wilds of Tajikistan; an earthquake mooted that plan, and the production moved far away to Estonia. The new location was downriver from a chemical plant — exposure to the toxic runoff may have contributed to the cancer that killed Tarkovsky a decade later.

“Zona” comes armed with source notes and a bibliography, but as if seeking respite from Tarkovskian heaviness, the writer skews light. However droll, his self-regarding asides can be wearisome: “Every time I see people drinking in films I am immediately seized with a desire to have a drink myself.” And?

Most enthusiastic about his enthusiasm for Tarkovsky, Dyer is highly protective of his “Stalker” experience, provocatively hyperbolic (playing with the notion that “cinema was invented so that Tarkovsky could make ‘Stalker’ ”) and overly ­eager to clear the field of potential rivals. ­Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Avventura,” a movie Tarkovsky admired as a useful precursor, is, per Dyer, “the nearest I have ever come to pure cinematic agony.” Other European masters are lightweights (“Belle de Jour” and “Breathless” are “unwatchable” or worse), while Dyer found another Tarkovsky favorite, Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest,” to be “a bit of a struggle.” The cult of ­“Stalker” is not limited to Dyer alone; while exacting in his judgment of Tarkovsky’s epigones, he is pleased to mention the film’s celebrated fans, including Bjork and Cate Blanchett.

Still, Dyer’s evocation of “Stalker” is vivid; his reading is acute and sometimes brilliant. Robert Bird, the Tarkovsky exegete he most often cites, has elsewhere characterized the Zone as the filmmaker’s quintessential space: “The Zone is where one goes to see one’s innermost desires. It is, in short, the cinema.” Dyer agrees and notes that the stalker who guides us there, “a persecuted martyr” transporting the viewer to the place “where ultimate truths are revealed,” is the artist himself. Tarkovsky strenuously resisted any allegorical interpretation of his work, but the movie is in some sense autobiography. (He wanted his wife, Larisa, to play the stalker’s much put-upon spouse.)

Just as Tarkovsky is the real protagonist of “Stalker,” Dyer is the true subject of “Zona.” As the stalker’s party approaches the Room, the footnotes, some running to six pages, proliferate. The author waxes increasingly personal in contemplating the nature of his own deepest desires, describing old girlfriends and LSD trips, elaborating on his missed sexual opportunities and his affection for dogs, at one point wondering, “What kind of writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?” Film critics are sometimes paid a left-handed compliment that their review was more enjoyable than the actual movie. That won’t necessarily be the case here — not because Dyer isn’t a stylish wordsmith, but because it’s likely that many of his readers have never seen “Stalker.” Does one need to know the film to fully appreciate Dyer’s riff? Or, would “Zona” be best read in complete innocence, as a novel in the form of a free-associative, wildly digressive audio commentary on the DVD of a movie too crazy to possibly exist? (In either case, Dyer is giving a performance, and it’s another Russian genius who presides over his book, namely Vladimir Nabokov, who contrived with “Pale Fire” a novel composed of a poem and its unhinged commentary.)