Safe Return Doubtful

This 1933 novel, which amazingly lay dormant, out of print, for more than 40 years, concerns Bertrand Caillet, the unwanted result of a lecherous and sinister priest with a murky and wolfish background raping a 14 year old French peasant girl in the early 1850s.

Caillet is raised by Aymar Galliez, the nephew of the woman who had hired the peasant girl as a maid, and his notes on Caillet, found in the form of a diary many years later, form this tale. It isn’t long before Aymar realises that something is untoward about the young Bertrand. The reader knows of course that Bertrand is a werewolf, but in his childhood this manifests itself gradually, he refuses to eat food cooked for him, suffers strange nightmares, and is present when two lambs are found dismembered.

It is the forest ranger, who discovered Caillet with the lambs, who realises the truth over the next couple of years. As he melts down his wife’s crucifix to forge a silver bullet Caillet, now a young man, takes off to Paris, where his urges can be satiated, and he can contiue his depredations in a wider populace, which just happens to coincide with the midst of the Franco-Prussian War, immediately before the terrible violence of the Paris Commune of 1871.

This is far more than just a bloody and gruesome horror story. As in Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stoker’s Dracula and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, much more ubiquitous issues are addressed, such as the realtionship between sex and violence, inherent traits and propensities, and personal responsibility.

As with those other greats I mentioned above, its real worth lies in invoking terror and pity in alternate equal doses so that the deepest and lasting emotion the reader has is tragedy.
But as Poe writes, in William Wilson..

…I have been, in some respects, the slave of circumstances beyond human control.

Endore encores in suggesting that we are but playthings of the dark compulsions beyond our understanding.

Published 1933 – My GoodReads score 5 / 5