In other words, Hoban was a cult writer, perhaps the last of that pre-Internet breed. I knew that one of my closest friends would become just that when, the first time I visited his house, I found a foot of Hoban titles on one of his shelves. No one else I knew had ever heard of him. It wasn’t just “Riddley Walker” that enthralled and transformed a certain small but very enthusiastic cadre of readers, either. Another friend swears by “The Medusa Frequency” (1987) in which the narrator — pining, like so many of Hoban’s characters, for an absent woman — keeps coming across the severed head of the Orpheus on the streets of modern London and communicates with the mythic Kraken via the glowing green lettering in his Apple II computer.

For myself, I’m partial to one of Hoban’s two naturalistic novels, “Turtle Diary” (1975), about two middle-aged people, living quintessentially British lives of quiet desperation, who become obsessed with freeing a pair of sea turtles from an aquarium. (This book was made into a film with Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley.) Like everything he wrote, “Turtle Diary” is suffused with a sweet melancholy that never curdles into sentimentality. Hoban is never going to lie to you — “Yer tern now my tern later,” says young Riddley to the wild boar he spears on page one — which means that when he offers you freedom or respite, it rings true.

It also rings so beautifully. Was there ever a novelist with such a knack for the music of English, not just its rhythms but its keys, and who also knew not to belabor that gift? Hoban is eminently quotable, but one of my favorites of his lines, from “The Medusa Frequency,” is pure description: “It was novembering hard outside; the dark air sang with the dwindle of the year, the sharpening of it to goneness that was drawing near.” His ear for the jaunty gallantry of the spoken word is what makes “Riddley Walker” a delight to read, especially if you remember to read it out loud.

Not long ago, Hoban cheekily speculated that only his death seemed likely to induce a revival of his reputation. Perhaps it will. And even if it doesn’t, that spark will never entirely fade away; there will always be Hobanists eager to spread the enthusiasm like the virus I strongly suspect it to be. To quote another line, this one from “The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz,” “I tell you what I have paid years to learn: everything that is found is always lost again, and nothing that is found is ever lost again. Can you understand that?” Oh yes, we can. Some of us, at least.