num_pages: 148
description: The inheritance of a cottage in the Welsh mountains from a bachelor uncle seems at first like unbelievable good fortune for the narrator and his wife, freeing them from their routine existence as schoolteachers in a Midlands suburb. But there is a binding condition to the bequest: that they take care of the dead man's pet, a cormorant he rescued from the oily waters of the Ouse.From the moment of its arrival at the cottage on a drizzly October afternoon, the cormorant creates turmoil and an ever-growing fear. For it is no ordinary sea-crow that bursts from its crate to rampage in the firelight, but a devil of a bird, black and malignant as a vampire bat. Even caged in the yard, the cormorant is a pagan and dangerous force, drawing down shrieking congregations of gulls from the sky. The narrator turns aside from his wife and his work to tame the bird, even training it to hunt as he grows in confidence. But a great, mischievous presence is never far away, watching his communion with the bird, the slow destruction of his family life and the cormorant's strange power over his baby son. As blizzards shroud the mountains in snow, a legacy of evil is sealed in searing rituals of blood and fire.The Cormorant is a marvellous and extraordinary novel, sensuously and beautifully written and with an unrelenting atmosphere of unease. There have been few more potent or persuasive portrayals of evil in modern fiction than Stephen Gregory's unforgettable creature of nightmare, the cormorant.
language: English
title: The Cormorant
titlecomplete: The Cormorant
genres: Fiction, Animals, Dark, Gothic, Birds, Horror, Adult, Novella, Literary Fiction, Audiobook
ratings_count: 860
places: Caernarfon, Gwynedd, Wales, Snowdonia, Wales
awards: awardedAt: 536486400000
name: Somerset Maugham Award
publisher: Heinemann