To His Father, to the Reapers

France, late 12th century.

A castle priest, young and ambitious, writes letters to long-deceased Latin writers, showing off his rhetorical skills and recounting the daily happenings in the castle and with himself. Meanwhile, the lord of the castle suddenly returns, having long ago taken the cross and gone to Palestine. It turns out that his journey did not go as planned, that he did not reach Palestine, but visited completely different lands, where he did not gain military glory; furthermore — upon returning home, he brought with him a mysterious evil that is hard to shake off…

“To His Father, to the Reapers,” at first glance a classic epistolary novel, is actually a subtle stylization that contains both truly dramatic events and unrestrained laughter, as well as historical mysteries.