The Hollow Beast
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A Globe and Mail Most Anticipated Spring Title
Don Quixote meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit in this slapstick epic about destiny, family demons, and revenge.
1911. A hockey game in Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula. With the score tied two-two in overtime, local tough guy Billy Joe Pictou fires the puck directly into Monti Bouge's mouth. When Pictou's momentum carries them both across the goal line in a spray of shattered teeth, Victor Bradley, erstwhile referee and local mailman, rules that the goal counts—and Monti's ensuing revenge for this injustice sprawls across three generations, one hundred years, and dozens of dastardly deeds. Fuelled by a bottomless supply of Yukon, the high-proof hooch that may or may not cause the hallucinatory sightings of a technicolor beast that haunts not just Monti but his descendants, it's up to Monti's grandson François—and his floundering doctoral dissertation—to make sense of the vendetta that's shaped the destiny of their town and everyone in it. Brilliantly translated into slapstick English by Lazer Lederhendler, The Hollow Beast introduces Christophe Bernard as a master of epic comedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Quebecois writer Bernard debuts with a feverish burlesque about a one-time hockey player's decades-long dispute with a referee and his grandson's attempts to reverse the family curse. During a junior hockey tournament on the remote Gaspé peninsula in 1911, teenage goalie Monti Bouge catches a puck between his teeth and is knocked unconscious into the back of his net. Hapless referee and town mailman Victor Bradley counts the goal, provoking Monti to vow revenge. Monti slides disastrously into adulthood as a failed gold panner in Ontario, and entertains himself in middle age by making Bradley deliver an entire encyclopedia set and other heavy packages. A parallel narrative follows Monti's alcoholic grandson, François, who's been evicted from his apartment in Montreal. He blames his squalor on a nebulous "beast" that may have stalked his family for generations. Returning home for the first time since leaving for college, he hopes to find out more about the curse-provoking misdeeds of Monti, who died by suicide when François was a baby. Though the reader often feels at sea in the sprawling phantasmagoria, Bernard's bawdiness and mania credibly evoke Thomas Pynchon's flights of invention. Lovers of virtuosic shaggy dog stories ought to take note.
