Guest Post: A.K. Preston – The Gevaudan Project

Today we have a guest post from A. K. Preston, author of the newly released thriller, The Gevaudan Project. The title refers to the Beast of Gevaudan, a legendary beast that I also researched for part of The Red Rider. It was reported to be a large wolf that terrorized France in the 18th century. A. K. Preston has created a modern day version for a Michael Crichton style science fiction thriller you won’t want to miss! Here he is with a brief description of his novel. Welcome, A. K.!

A team of naturalists find themselves facing a nightmare beyond anything they have ever known – and the product of unspeakable evil.

Philip Caster, a former Green Beret now working as a zoologist, leads an international team in Indonesia whose revolutionary new program may spell salvation for the endangered Sumatran tiger. They will release six artificially-conceived cubs into the wild, accompanied by their surrogate mothers. The effort will prove the feasibility of in vitro breeding as a new tool against extinction. But its success is overshadowed by the sudden emergence of a horror beyond reckoning. Something has been unleashed in the forests of Sumatra. A life-form never meant to walk the earth. One that claims humanity as its only prey.

As death unfolds around them, Caster and his circle of friends must uncover the truth behind an abomination: the instrument of dark and all-too-human forces pursuing a twisted ideological vision. Their creation has killed already – and their plans will consume millions more.

The idea for The Gevaudan Project came to me somewhat by accident. I had always cherished a dream of becoming a published author, but most of my stories ideas at the time derived from classical space opera. Like many authors entering that genre for the very first time, I succumbed to a rather severe case of “worldbuilder’s disease.” My creative output largely became an incomprehensible mess of fictive timelines, political systems, cultures, etc. with no actual narrative writing to speak of. Being a full-time student, the demands of my schooling produced its own dampening effect.

Ultimately, a clean slate was the only thing that got me anywhere as a writer. I used my spring break in 2012 for a solo trip of Washington D.C.  I had never taken a completely self-guided tour before, and the adventure of it appealed to me. I remember sitting in my hotel room the night after my plane landed, watching a special on Animal Planet for lack of any other programming to hold my interest. This particular episode centered on a man-eating crocodile of monstrous size that had terrorized a village in the Philippines for months before it was ultimately hunted down and captured alive. The show’s subject matter seemed the furthest thing removed from the story ideas I’d been considering at that time – I had settled on it that night to give myself a rest from them. But it suddenly occurred to me that a small corner of my intended fictional universe had been illuminated. The centuries-long future history I had in mind would necessarily grow out of events taking place within our own twenty-first century. What if one of them involved a scenario similar to what I was watching that very moment – but with an added element of human evil and scientific horror?

There was another level of inspiration too. Sometime earlier, I had learned of the “Beast of Gevaudan” through an online episode of Animal X (perhaps passingly familiar to any cryptozoology enthusiasts reading this). In eighteenth century France, an unknown animal had killed approximately one hundred children, youths, and women over the course of three years, eluding multiple attempts to capture or kill it by professional hunters and soldiers (equipped by the full resources of the French Crown). In the end, a lone farmer killed it, ending what had been a rampage of both death and fear across the province of Gevaudan. To this day, modern scholars debate precisely what this creature was. Perhaps a wolf-dog, even a hyena or something else entirely. It is precisely the mystery, the seeming unnatural “wrongness” of its identity and its actions that makes this story so fearfully compelling almost 200 years later.

This legend intrigued me enough to remain in the back of my mind a long while. Now, both elements joined together to birth the germ of an idea. What if our own age had its Beast, a monster completely unknown to our current understanding? Not just unknown, but unnatural, literally embodying the evil ascribed to the original beast in an age more superstitious than our own? What if this creature had a deliberate purpose – one more unholy and terrifying than the monster itself?

In The Gevaudan Project, I hope to achieve a modern parable, exploring the fears and dangers of our times and perhaps those of future generations. For every age will have its monsters – some human, some not. Our stories remind us they can be beaten.

Curious for more? Click to enjoy this sample from A.K. Preston, The Patron!