Summer ends, the season changes, andCoro, an artist frightened off by what her own paintings may represent, gets in her car and drives for hours in the middle of the nightuntil she chances uponBetania, an isolated house existing in a world of its own. It’sanunfamiliar place inhabited exclusively by women who,strangely,all seem to know her. Like adherents of an ancient cult,the women of Betania all dress the same,carry out strange rites and celebrations, andlive alongside goats and innumerable dogs against a landscape dominated by an immense, imposing mountain that seems to block out the sunlight. Theirs is ahierarchical, closed, and restless universewhere—as the other women tell her and despite her attempts to escape the area—Coro may finally discover what it means to be part of something. A ”Hotel California” of the human heart, Pilar Adon’sOf Beasts and Fowl is a novel about the things that we do without knowing why, but that have an explanation that perhaps we willsome day come tounderstand.