The Dogheads

12 hrs. 49 min.

Language Russian

Author Alexey Ivanov

Narrator Ivan Litvinov

Description

This work is the first book in Russia about dangerologists—people who hunt deadly dangerous artifacts from the world’s culture.

Three young Muscovites come to a “casual job” in a remote village of the Volga region: they have to remove a dying fresco from the wall of an abandoned church. The fresco depicts a heretical image of Saint Christopher with a dog’s head. It turns out the village used to be a schismatic hermitage, and the “casual job” is an experience of mysterious dangerologists—“sappers” of world culture. And in the fog of peat fires, the lost historical memory gives rise to a dreadful Psoglavets—either a demon of the schismatics, or a god of the camp guards.

If you like, this is a genre novel—a horror about werewolves. If you like, it’s a new village prose. If you like—it’s a stylization of web-surfing on the theme of the Russian schism. But overall, “Psoglavtsy” is a story about the invisible boundaries of culture and the keepers of those boundaries. Every society has a certain circle of beliefs, and society does not allow a person to leave that circle. And if someone dares to cross the sacred boundary, then monsters rush after them.