November 25, 2019:

What I love especially in Against the Fall of Night is the way an entire society's mythology turns out to be radically, meaning root and branch, false.

That, and the way the majority of the people struggle with all their might to find ways to continue to believe it.

This is the root of Alvin's loneliness. The myth to which literally all others have been conditioned doesn't impact him. It's not merely he has no fear of The Invaders. It's that the collapse of his society's ideological self-understanding affects him not at all.