Loup Garou: A Wolf in Priest's Vestments

Vincent Hérbert is a successful author of a series of books that follow the adventures of Buddy and Theo, an unwitting pair of traveling encyclopedia salesmen, and their accidental but uncanny encounters with area folklore such as Diana of the Dunes, the Pope Lick Monster and the Wendigo cannibals. Despite the fact that Vince was raised in “the place where myth and legend are inseparable from everyday life”, he has thus far avoided imaginatively revisiting Louisiana with his fictional protagonists. Neither has he returned home with his wife Anna and their three young children in large part because of a particular monster that he has never forgotten from his past. Eventually his agent Lydia, because of the marketing potential she recognizes, and Anna, because she senses the presence of a secret ghost that is causing her husband to drift farther away from his family, conspire to change his mind. As expected, Vince finds no shortage of local legends for Buddy and Theo to interact with including the Hellhounds of Barataria Bay, The Devil Man of Algiers, The Grunch, the Honey Island Swamp Monster, and the ghost of Mary Glass. But his research, along with seemingly fated circumstances, are also reacquainting him with all the disappointments, mistakes and regrets that he’d run away from so many years ago. Many of those regrets resurface when he reunites with his sister Genie whom he abandoned after she become pregnant out of wedlock, and his cousin Laurent who followed him into the sables mouvants [quicksand]. The target of much of his resentment is his deceased père [father] whom he unexpectedly discovers he has much in common with. The revelations have only just begun however, as all paths inevitably lead him into confrontation with the legendary loup garou [Cajun werewolf] and it quickly becomes evident that this time there is no option where both he and the haunting animal survive.