Story summary
Краткое содержание: The Life-Eater
- Чтение: 8 мин.
- 8 parts
- Аудио скоро
A rum-drinking occultist stalks a shapeless nocturnal horror in a swamp village.
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The Life-Eater — кратко о книге
Краткое содержание: 8 min на чтение
- Время чтения
- Около 30 min25 min fast, 35 min slow
- Длительность
- Слов: 6 8803 chapters
- Страницы
- Страниц: 3232 in large print
- Уровень в библиотеке
- Средний longer sentences, everyday words
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). Сколько времени нужно на чтение классики · Обновлено
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The Life-Eater in short
The Life-Eater follows a village under siege. In La Foubelle, deaths come at night and leave bodies shriveled like emptied skins. Doctor Hugo Lamontaine, a rum-loving occultist, explains that an elemental spirit is feeding on human vitality, brought through the veil by a human medium.
What The Life-Eater is about
What kills a person in the night and leaves nothing but a shriveled shell, skin puckered into a thousand wrinkles? In the swamp village of La Foubelle, nobody can say. The people call it the sickness without a sickness, and they bar their doors at dusk.
The Life-Eater is a pulp horror tale by Harold Ward, written in five brief chapters. It sets a red-bearded doctor, a frightened schoolmaster and a village constable against a force that feeds on human strength. You get a swamp hamlet, a parrot that repeats invitations to drink, and a theory of spirits stranger than any ghost story.
Для кого. You will enjoy this if you like swamp settings, occult doctors, creeping dread and quick chapters that end on a hook. It suits anyone who wants a complete horror tale in a single sitting.
The story in 8 parts
Key idea 1 · free to read
A village learns to fear the night
The story opens in La Foubelle, a small village at the edge of a great swamp. Death has struck there again and again. The graveyard, shaded by cypress trees, is nearly full, and almost every house has lost someone.
The pattern is always the same. The horror comes only at night. Its victims writhe in agony, and afterward the body lies shriveled and deflated, the skin wrinkled like a collapsed balloon. At dusk the streets empty, and families huddle behind shut doors.
One villager has already spoken of what he saw. Jules Delatour, the village drunkard, whimpers that he watched a black, see-through thing hover over his dying mother. It had no shape, he says, but it had a face twisted in fury. Nobody believes him, because Jules was drinking that night.
The villagers cling to the customs and fears of their ancestors, and the swamp cuts them off from the modern world. That isolation makes the horror seem possible. You feel the dread of an ordinary street at nightfall.
Fear grows strongest where people are isolated, frightened and unwilling to believe the one man who has seen the truth.
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The doctor believes in the unseen
Doctor Hugo Lamontaine is the man the village trusts.
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A friend offers himself as bait
Lamontaine adds one more point.
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The horror takes shape at the d'Arcy house
The second chapter is called The Thing, and it shows the creature at last.
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The hunter becomes the hunted
In the third chapter, called Out of the Night, Lamontaine sits alone after midnight.
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Iron, a pentagon and a trap is made ready
Chapter four is titled Exorcism.
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Belief and reason share one room
One theme runs through the story.
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How a pulp tale builds its spell
The Life-Eater is told in five short sections, with titles for the second through fifth marking stages of the action.
Read all 8 key ideas now
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Characters, plot and themes
Main characters
- Doctor Hugo Lamontaine A red-bearded physician and occultist who drinks rum, studies black magic and sets out to stop the horror killing the village.
- Noel Pelletier The frail village schoolmaster, called the dominie, who loves Evelyn l'Brest and is willing to risk his life to save her.
- Evelyn l'Brest A young former pupil of the schoolmaster, struck down by the sickness, whose life hangs in the balance.
- Pierre Le Front The small, nervous village constable who fears the unseen thing but helps the doctor with his plan.
- Aaron Kronk A gaunt master of sorcery and skilled hypnotist, already beaten once by Lamontaine, who lurks in the swamp and laughs from the water.
- Jules Delatour The village drunkard who sees the dark, smoke-like thing over his dying mother, though nobody believes him.
How it ends (spoiler)
The iron pentagon pierces the creature and touches the schoolmaster's chest, and the wraith fades away, leaving a five-sided mark on his skin. Kronk escapes by boat after Lamontaine breaks his arm. The doctor explains that Kronk, using the name Koshier, owns the swamp and wants the village gone so it can be drained for rice. He used supernatural terror to frighten the villagers into leaving their homes. Evelyn will live.
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Вопросы о книге The Life-Eater
What is The Life-Eater about?
It tells of a swamp village where people die at night, drained of life. A red-bearded doctor and occultist, Hugo Lamontaine, believes a nature spirit is feeding on human vitality and sets out to stop it.
Who is Aaron Kronk in The Life-Eater?
Kronk is the story's villain, a gaunt sorcerer and hypnotist. Lamontaine beat him weeks earlier in another fight, and now Kronk is thought to be the medium through whom the deadly spirit takes shape.
What is an elemental in this story?
In the doctor's theory, elementals are primal nature spirits that never evolved. They envy and hate living humans, and outside their own realm they must feed on human vitality to survive. They fear the touch of iron.
Is The Life-Eater a short read?
It is a brief tale of five short chapters with quick scenes, strong images and plenty of dialogue. Each chapter ends on a hook, so it is easy to follow in one sitting.
Who wrote The Life-Eater and what kind of story is it?
Harold Ward, who died in 1950, wrote it as pulp horror. Like the weird magazine fiction of its day, it mixes occult lore, a Louisiana swamp setting and a fearless doctor hero.
Как сослаться на это издание
Ward, Harold. The Life-Eater. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-life-eater.
Ward, H. (2026). The life-eater. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-life-eater
Ward, Harold. The Life-Eater. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-life-eater.
@book{ward2026lifeeater,
author = {Ward, Harold},
title = {The Life-Eater},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-life-eater}
}
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