Strange Horizons, March 9, 2020
Reviewed by Anthony Perconti
This week’s issue of Strange Horizons features the short story “La Bête” by Leah Bobet. This story takes place in the post war French countryside in which a nameless mademoiselle purchases a dilapidated chateau that has seen better days. The seller of the estate, an elderly Dowager, moves into a comfortable cottage in the nearby village. The once regal domicile and its environs have been slowly reclaimed over the decades by ever encroaching nature.
To wit, when the mademoiselle explores the grand library, this point of reclamation is driven home in spades. “I was summoned to the room midafternoon for appraisal. It gaped like an opened cadaver, the intestines burst. Freed from the walls, the briar had filled the library; thorns garrotted the central stone pillar. They seemed endless and still-growing, creaking against a lifetime of constraint. Soon the balconies would be subsumed, and then the airy shaft down to the door, everything serrated with roses.”
The young woman’s contracted craftsmen have serious apprehensions regarding the highly evasive thorned cultivars. Monsieur Angel is concerned that the library walls, which are absolutely integral to the overall structure, have been weakened by the canes decades long burrowing. There is the real risk of a total structural collapse.
To gain further information concerning the plants, the new owner pays a visit to the Dowager in her cottage. Bobet writes; “She thought that her story was unique: once upon a time there was a girl who knew no better, and a grown man who behaved like a beast. There glowed a strange soldier’s light in her eye as she detailed the small ways he had bent to accommodate her—a slight restraint upon his whims and moods, bare table manners, the rose garden—all communicated with a breathless confiding, insensitive to my shuttered face. It was the same story every school friend who spent the war with German officers told; they told it with the same eyes. My gaze landed on that frail hand, on the curve where the bone jutted out, inexpertly healed, so it left the fingers crooked. I understood now why the Dowager had proscribed me the library. She did not love the house. It had been the site of an occupation, and I had gravely misjudged.”
At the tales conclusion, the young mademoiselle returns to the chateau, armed with her leather driving gloves and sharpened pruning shears. She begins her assault on the thorned invaders. She states that the roses would be gone by morning. Whether the house stands or collapses is almost a secondary concern. What is important is that her eventual fate is decided on her own terms, forged by her own hands. Irrespective of the eventual outcome, the Beast is slain.
Anthony Perconti lives and works in the hinterlands of New Jersey with his wife and kids. He enjoys well-crafted and engaging stories across a variety of genres and mediums. His articles have appeared in several online venues and can be found on Twitter at @AnthonyPerconti.