Lycanthropy

THE WEREWOLF OF PARIS--Guy Endore --Farrar & Rinehart ($2).

Good horror stories are rarer than almost any other kind of fiction. When the blurb-writer for The Werewolf of Paris wanted a horror-classic to compare it with, he hit on Bram Stoker's famed Dracula (1899). still the seldom-disputed favorite in its field. Author Endore's discursive narrative does not keep up to Dracula's plane but it has its moments.

Lycanthropy was a family failing among the Pitamonts. One Christmas Eve in mid-Nineteenth Century Paris Bertrand, product of Father Pitamont's rape of a servant girl, was born into the tradition. A preternaturally quiet baby, he had hair on his palms. Aside from this infallible sign, his adopted father Aymar had good reason to know all about him. He took the child and his mother into the country and brought the boy up carefully, hoping for the best. But lycanthropy will out: before Bertrand was full-grown farmers thereabouts began to complain of midnight raids on their sheep. Locking Bertrand in his room only made him worse. Finally he escaped; Aymar tracked him into Paris by a trail of murders. During the siege of the city (this was in 1870) and the nightmare of the Commune, Werewolf Bertrand fed at will. But by the time Aymar found him Bertrand had fallen in love and was making desperate efforts to cure himself. But he was too far gone; one night he was caught redhanded, red-mouthed. Aymar, by now thoroughly convinced that the Medieval Church was right, would have preferred to have Bertrand burned at the stake. In the up-to-date asylum the result, though slower, was the same.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.