It's rare to find an intelligent and original
story on a topic such as werewolves, but Fred Vargas has certainly managed it in this evocative tale of the hunt for such a creature in the Alps of South-West France. Part horror, part thriller, part poetic desciption of rural
life in the French Alps, the story follows the complex, strange character of Commissaire Adamsberg as he tracks down a beast responsible for cutting a swathe of destruction through this remote area of Europe.
The
true power of the novel lies in its exploration of the superstition and myth which survive in the remoter areas of Europe even in our day. The silent, solitary shepherds of the
mountains who find their sheep slain are men who have grown up with tales of hairless men who turn into wolves under the light of the full moon. Two such men set off in an old farm truck after their employer is found with her throat torn out. An eccentric individual
living nearby, a man who shuns the villagers and lives the life of a hermit, disappears at the same time. Together with the Commissaire and a Parisian musician who has left the city to live in the village they make a strange posse as they traverse the mountains seeking their prey.
This is an unusual book. For all it is a tale of werewolves and slaughter; it is a strangely, gentle book. The true hero of the tale is the landscape and the timeless nature of its
existence and the existence of those who make a tough living out of it. It is a story where Paris is remote, not just in
terms of kilometres but in terms of centuries. It is a tale that looks at rural life without falling into the trap of the modern era's sentimentality when it comes to such matters. Most of all it is a book where a fast-paced thriller blends with an ageless lifestyle and where the taciturn silence of the mountain men speaks with an eloquence far superior to the loquaciousness of any modern, urban sophisticate.
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