Lokis Reading Order

Lokis (1869) by Prosper Mérimée is the last and most elaborate of his fantastic tales — a story set in Lithuania, narrated by a Lutheran pastor who has been hired to translate the Bible into Lithuanian and who stays as a guest at the castle of the young Count Szeynczyn. The Count is brilliant, charming, and intermittently strange: his mother is confined to a room in the castle, having been rendered permanently insane by a traumatic event before his birth. As the narrator gradually understands, the Count believes himself to be the son of a bear — his mother was attacked by a bear at the time of his conception, and the Count's behavior throughout the story is interpretable either as the eccentricity of an aristocrat or as the behavior of a man who is literally half-animal. The story ends with the Count's murder of his bride on their wedding night, in a manner that is explicitly described as a bear attack. Lokis is Mérimée's most sustained exercise in maintaining the fantastic ambiguity: the narrator is scrupulously rational and cannot confirm the supernatural explanation, and the story refuses to resolve the question of whether the Count is a werewolf, a man who believes himself to be a werewolf, or simply a violent lunatic.