Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot is the picaresque fable of the love that grows between the mute, telepathic human monstrosity Hercules and the beautiful Henriette—a love that will entwine their fates forever. Author Carl-Johan Vallgren creates an unforgettable cast of grotesqueries in a magical and atmospheric tour of nineteenth-century Europe—from the bordello, where Hercules is born, to the squalor of the asylum, where he finds only pain, to the sinister grandeur of the Jesuit monasteries in which he finds both shelter and peril, to the phantasmagoria of the freak show with which he travels. A moving, uplifting, at times dark and macabre tale of social oppression, official corruption, religious persecution, and unwavering devotion, it is a story that enchants and surprises . . . and leaves one wide-eyed with wonder, like a small child at his first carnival. “Weirdly compelling . . . summons a world of light and dark, beauty and deformation.” - Publishers Weekly Vallgren paints a cast of grotesques in a magical and atmospheric tour of nineteenth-century Europe in this story of social oppression and religious persecution with a marvellous love story. Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot is the picaresque fable of the love that grows between the mute, telepathic human monstrosity Hercules and the beautiful Henriette—a love that will entwine their fates forever. Author Carl-Johan Vallgren creates an unforgettable cast of grotesqueries in a magical and atmospheric tour of nineteenth-century Europe—from the bordello, where Hercules is born, to the squalor of the asylum, where he finds only pain, to the sinister grandeur of the Jesuit monasteries in which he finds both shelter and peril, to the phantasmagoria of the freak show with which he travels. A moving, uplifting, at times dark and macabre tale of social oppression, official corruption, religious persecution, and unwavering devotion, it is a story that enchants and surprises . . . and leaves one wide-eyed with wonder, like a small child at his first carnival. Carl-Johan Vallgren is the author of eight novels; this is the first to be translated into English. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden. Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred By Carl-Johan Vallgren Harper Perennial Copyright © 2007 Carl-Johan Vallgren All right reserved. ISBN: 9780060842147 Chapter One West Tisbury Martha's Vineyard, Mass., USA July 15, 1994 Dear Miss Vogel, First I would like to thank you for your visit, which has left me many precious memories, and which has also, I hope, answered some of your questions. Genealogy is for me an uncharted area, but in your case, it would be hard not to draw the same conclusions as you have done: namely, that while you have kept the woman's surname, mine is, as you so rightly guessed, the anglicised form of our ancestor's German name. I am old now, as the first Barefoot came to be in his day, and the price I'm paying for extreme old age is loneliness. If your guesses prove correct, then you are my closest living relative on my father's side. In Chilmark parish I am the only one left who remembers him. He died in 1914, from the after-effects of mumps, shortly before the outbreak of World War I. By then he had reached the grand age of 101. That was the same summer as I turned eight, long before mass tourism transformed Martha's Vineyard into the outdoor museum you encountered during your, alas, far too brief stay on the island. I called him Grandfather, though this was inaccurate: he had outlived all his children and was in fact my great-grandfather. The attached memoranda are a record of what he told my relatives, in particular my older sisters and myself. The rest is the result of my own research more than half a century ago. Information derived from the archives in Germany is naturally at your disposal. You may find the material from Königsberg of particular interest, the original records, as you know, having disappeared during the chaos of the war years. When he was still alive I was too young to understand the details of his story: mainly I remember him as a kind-hearted little man, his face concealed behind a cloth mask, an expert at the grammar of sign language who, one day when I was visiting, whispered clear as can be, but without moving his lips: Better to hold your tongue and be taken for a jester, than to speak and dispense with all doubt of it! The quote, I later learned, came from Lincoln, whom he had once met. The first deaf people came to Martha's Vineyard in the 1790s. Intermarriage caused the handicap to spread throughout the area. In my youth there were deaf people in every family. In Tisbury and Chilmark parishes they made up about a third of the population, in some of the villages all the inhabitants had hearing defects, so in the end the whole island learned sign language. Th