The Hunter is built around a single porous boundary, between a young orphan's waking life and a dream world that keeps pulling at him. The novel never settles which side is the real one. Its narrator is directionless and pursued, and the question Ward holds open is which of the two worlds will finally give him the meaning he is looking for.

The book shares the preoccupations of Ward's other JEF novel, Prism and Graded Monotony: death, survival, and the thin membrane between consciousness and the unconscious. Of the two, The Hunter is the clearer line in.