The Questing Beast

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

A sense of fatality haunts the tragic lives of two men, Napoleon and his son Andre. It is the legacy of a tragic secret hidden somewhere in the past left behind when young Leon left Thetford Mines and a life of grinding poverty to make his fortune in the South. The lives of the two men, though they differ in detail, are in essence poisoned by the same cast of evil, as is gradually revealed in alternating glimpses first of Leon, then of Andre — the past and the present. Unhappy themselves, they bring unhappiness and worse into the lives they touch, and not until the denouement is the source of evil finally revealed. Two sombre stories entwine in this haunting tale of passion never satisfied, of lies never expiated, of lives never allowed to flower.