The Fifth head of Cerberus contains three interconnecting novellas set on the twin worlds of Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix. The setting is one of far future, where humans have started crossing the stars and inhabiting other planets. Gene Wolfe is famous for crafting his novels as puzzles and leaving the readers to come up with the solutions. Indeed, The Fifth head of Cerberus contains unreliable narrators, melding of dreams and reality, folk tales, unprovable conjectures, non-linear narration, and many other techniques to create an engrossing puzzle surrounding the aboriginal people of the world of Sainte Anne. The prose is fluid, the themes are thought-provoking, and the puzzles invite a lot of theorizing and connecting the dots.

Some spoilers now : Taken together, the first novella The Fifth head of Cerberus, and the third novella V.R.T. tell an almost coherent story with a few missing pieces, but the second novella "A Story" by John V. Marsch, while providing some answers to the missing pieces, introduces a whole raft of questions and really muddles the clarity of the overall story. It seems that the second novella is more of a morality tale, and not to be taken literally. My conjecture is that the mechanism that the shadow children are using in the second novella to shield the indigenous population from star crossers is actually shape-shifting, and when this protection is lifted at the end of the second novella, the parallel is V.R.T revealing that he is actually an abo in his notes in prison in the third novella and hence revealing the secret of the abos.