The Black Monkey

Zakhar Prilepin is a prose writer, publicist, and musician—recipient of awards including “The Big Book,” “National Bestseller,” and “Yasnaya Polyana.” He is the author of novels “Obitel’,” “Sanya,” “Pathologies,” “Black Monkey,” and collections of short stories “Vosmёrka,” “Sin,” and “Seven Lives,” as well as collections of essays and publicism: “Peresvet is on his way to us,” “Flying Burlaks,” “Not a Foreign Outcry,” and “Everything That Must Be Resolved.”

A scorching Moscow summer is coming to an end in the late 2000s—so hot it feels like the underworld. And an “hell inside the head” of the main character, a young journalist investigating child killers. There is a secret laboratory where they study especially cruel children—and a mysterious legend about “little ones” who seized and destroyed a medieval city. There’s a brutal murder of the residents of an entire apartment building in a Russian province committed by “people of small stature”—and a squad of merciless little soldiers fighting in Africa… “Black Monkey” is a psychological drama, a political thriller—a “portrait of a sick soul struggling in the dead-ends of flesh and the labyrinths of reason.”