“For one kingdom,” Crowley tells us, “is all kingdoms: a hill, a road, a dark wood; a castle to come to; a perilous bridge to cross.” There is more than one history of the world. “Arriving at each new city,” writes Italo Calvino, one of Crowley’s more respectable forebears, “the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had.” I imagine I am not the only reader to arrive at Crowley’s books with an uncanny sense of recognition, of having known these stories before, because they are my own stories, though I had, until just now, entirely forgotten them. To read Crowley is to become like the crow Dar Oakley in “Ka”: “girdled in story, trapped in story, and the only way out was to go through.”