Lafferty had himself pigeonholed as a science fiction author, but the SF veneer here is fairly thin, with a little fantasy thrown in. If anything, the story has fewer "impossible" elements than most of his stories. This story of Irish immigrants in the rural Midwest (or if you insist, alien Puca immigrants to Earth) is strangely savage, marked by the author's typically surreal violence and verbal extravagance. Think of Tom Sawyer rewritten by Stephen King, and you may get some idea. Better yet, just read it.By the way, I do not think the last line of the chapter title poem "Or Altered World or Dead Dulanty" is a typo. I've seen that slightly awkward formulation of Either/Or somewhere before.