A shattering pair of novellas in the tradition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Dusklands probes the links between the powerful and the powerless. Vietnam Project is narrated by a researcher investigating the effectiveness of United States propaganda and psychological warfare in Vietnam. The question of power is also explored in The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee, the story of an eighteenth-century Boer frontiersman who vows revenge on the Hottentot natives because they have failed to treat him with the respect that he thinks a white man deserves.

With striking intensity, J. M. Coetzee penetrates the twilight land of obsession, charting the nature on colonization as it seeks, in 1970 as in 1760, to absorb the wilds into the Western dusklands.