Even in the age of ebooks and digital downloads, some works of literature remain elusive. Such a work is – or rather was – Mark Z Danielewski's The Fifty Year Sword: first published in Holland in 2005, in two runs of 1,000 copies, it is only now readily available in the UK. Danielewski's cult status is such that I would warrant that more people knew about it from such discussion sites as the MZD [Mark Z Danielewski] forum than from an encounter with the text itself.

The novella's publication history is wholly appropriate. Danielewski has been acclaimed as a writer of "ergodic" fiction, a form defined by the academic Espen Aarseth, who sounds as if he might be a Danielewski character, as a literature where "non-trivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text". Take, for example, Danielewski's debut, House of Leaves, a book that, to my mind, utterly exhausted and gloriously completed a particular kind of postmodernist fiction. The story of a house with impossible geometry, in which we learn about the owner's films of it through a blind academic, whose manuscript falls into the hands of a drifter, who bolsters the text with his own ephemera, including the letters his mother sent from a lunatic asylum, all with notes from the editors. It's a labyrinth, a riddle, a puzzle-box. It involves looking things up, tracking clues and hints and coincidences. Where I take issue with Aarseth's definition is that it omits the sheer pleasure of reading this kind of book. For anyone daunted by the prospect of House of Leaves, or for that matter his Bonnie and Clyde-style road-spree, Only Revolutions, then The Fifty Year Sword is an intriguing and enjoyable introduction to his work.

Like the other books, it is at heart a ghost story. Chintana, a needlewoman, goes to a Halloween party held by 112-year-old Mose Dettledown, this year in honour of Belinda Kite. Unfortunately, Belinda has had an affair with Chintana's husband, so she distracts herself listening to a story told to five orphans by a shadowy storyteller who introduces himself as "a bad man with a very black / heart" and who carries a box marked T50YS. It's a gothic fantasia of his quest across The Valley of Salt, The Forest of Falling Notes and the Mountain of Manyone Paths to beg a weapon from the Man With No Arms, who has made swords that can kill seasons, countries and even ideas. The five orphans unlock the five clasps on the box. Inside is the hilt of a weapon. Any more synopsis would spoil the story, but suffice to say it has an MR James-esque frisson.

As with other books by Danielewski, it is ingeniously typeset – more poem than prose, with blank pages facing each page of text and interspersed art works composed of stitching (remember, Chintana is a needlewoman). The art interrelates beautifully: a string cuts across two lines to make "the / weapons", then beneath, "he made were s / words". At the novella's climax, the fusion of art and language is exhilarating and even frightening. The text is cut into quotations, with five different speakers signified by five autumnally coloured different quotation marks. The prologue suggests the five speakers were independently interviewed after the event; "one of whom in the early years slept with another and now endlessly wonders about the lakes of fall where someone else once wandered; two of whom still nurture their affection for one another, expressing so in an array of notes and overseas phone calls; a fourth who lost three; and the last of whom from the prison of a later life hates them all". Are these the five orphans, named as Tarff, Ezade, Iniedia, Sithiss and 'Ittle Micit? To give an impression of the mental peregrinations Danielewski leads the reader down, I noted that the initial letters of their names can be anagrammised as "times" or "smite", the terminal letters as "feats" or "fates"; the Greek Fates spun the lives of humans, with Atropos, the oldest of the Fates, cutting the thread – and Atropos means "without turn", so the opposite of "only revolutions" and so on and so on. That's before we get to what the names might mean, if anything. Why do the children – if it is they – mispronounce words like "annahilation", "disremattered"? Do they add up to a code? I foresee many nights with online dictionaries, the exploration of homophones, and suchlike.

I was going to end this review by saying the book can just be read as a ghoulish campfire tale. But it can't. That is the fundamental message of Danielewski's astonishing work. Nothing can be read as "just" a story.