Synopses & Reviews
A stormy night in 1813.
Two babies are born to prostitutes.
One child is a healthy girl;
the other, a hideously deformed boy.
This is the picaresque fable of the love that grows between the mute monster Hercules, who possesses the power to read minds, and the beautiful Henriette a love that will entwine their fates forever.
Carl-Johan Vallgren paints a cast of grotesqueries in a magical and atmospheric tour of nineteenth-century Europe: the swags and tails of the Bordello, where Hercules is born; the squalor of the asylum, where he finds only pain; the sinister grandeur of the Jesuit monasteries in which he finds both shelter and peril; and the phantasmagoria of the freak show with which he travels.
The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot tells a tale of social oppression, official corruption, and religious persecution, but is, at its heart, an amazing love story. Moving, uplifting, at times dark and macabre, this novel stretches the bounds of imagination, presenting the bizarre as the everyday and leading you through it like a child wide-eyed in wonder at a carnival.
Review
"Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin and Jerzy Kosinski's Chauncy Gardener are Hercules's literary forebears; he joins them as an unforgettable hero, an unsettling miracle-worker whose path to love is filled with incredible pain. A truly fantastic tale of a heartbreaking saint." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Synopsis
Vallgren paints a cast of grotesques in a magical and atmospheric tour of nineteenth-century Europe in this story of social oppression and religious persecution with a marvellous love story.
Synopsis
GB
About the Author
Carl-Johan Vallgren is the author of eight novels, of which The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot is the first to be translated into English. His novels have been translated into eleven languages. He lives in Stockholm.