“And they lived happily ever after,” the narrator says.

They marry and have a son, whom they name Apollo. But Brian persists and is gradually, eventually rewarded. In this fetid atmosphere, two Queens residents meet: “Lillian Kagwa emigrated from Uganda,” the narrator tells us, in a knowing magic-realist tone, “while Brian West arrived from the only slightly less foreign territory of Syracuse.” It’s love at first sight for Brian, a parole officer keeping an eye on Lillian’s boss, but not for her. LaValle begins his tale way back in 1968, in the brief Fun City era of Mayor John Lindsay, at a moment that foreshadowed the city’s darker days of the ’70s: A sanitation workers’ strike is in progress, and the streets of all five boroughs are piling fast with uncollected garbage. “The Changeling,” it should be noted, is a particular kind of fairy tale: “the old kind,” in the words of the omniscient narrator, “when such stories were meant for adults, not kids.” Once upon a time, that is. He gets that happiness isn’t somewhere you live forever it’s an apartment whose rent isn’t stabilized, much less controlled. The three words (spoiler alert) are in fact uttered on the last page of “The Changeling,” but LaValle revises them as soon as they’ve been spoken. (The urban action is interrupted only by a couple of nervous forays into the terra incognita of Nassau County.) In New York, its natives know, there’s no such thing as “ever after”: Everything changes, all the time, and the best we can do is plant our feet and hold on tight, straphangers on the hurtling express train of fate. ‘Happily ever after.’” Everybody’s a critic, especially in New York City, where this bitter man lives and where virtually the entirety of LaValle’s story - which is a fairy tale - takes place.

“I think I hate those fairy tales,” an evil old man declares in Victor LaValle’s strange and wonderful new novel, “The Changeling.” “Not really the tales, but how they end.

The changeling lavalle