truepenny | Review: Sanchez Romero & Schwalb, Beast

Beast: Werewolves, Serial Killers, and Man-Eaters: The Mystery of the Monsters of the Gévaudan by S.R. Schwalb

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I watched The Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) shortly after it came out (I think I mentioned it in my dissertation), and I knew it was based on something that really happened (although the movie diverges wildly and happily from reality), so I was glad to find a book that was a history of the story behind the folklore that inspired TBotW.

I would have been more glad if it had been a better book.

The first part is an imaginative account of the rampages of la Bete, including my particular hobby horse, passages from the point of view of the victims. The second part is a discussion of what la Bete (or les Betes, for there were (at least) two of them) actually was. The subtitle promises "werewolves, serial killers, and man-eaters," but there's no substantive discussion of either werewolves or serial killers, since it's perfectly obvious from the accounts of survivors and, hello, the AUTOPSIES, that la Bete was neither of those things and Sanchez Romero & Schwalb knew that going in. I find the blatant PR move more than a little annoying, especially since they weren't substantive discussions, just sort of glancing through the history of things like porphyria and lycanthropy (which is a psychiatric phenomenon where people believe that and behave like they are wolves, up to and including cannibalism). It was more retelling of folklore than anything else.

The proper discussion of what la Bete was is repetitive and for all that they lay out tables and drawings of skulls and so on, it was hard to get any sense of acumen or incisiveness out of it. (The word I'm circling is sharp, that sense of the authors knowing exactly what they want to say and how to say it. Hear No Evil may or may not be out on the lunatic fringe, but it is very sharply written.) Their consensus is that la Bete premiere, the Chazes Wolf, was in fact a massive wolf, and la Bete deuxieme, the Tenazeyre Canid, was a wolf-dog hybrid.

This isn't a very long book, but there's a lot of padding in it.

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