Ma Loute

The story takes place at the dawn of the 20th century, in around 1910 or so. In summer, on the Channel coast, the small eatery “The Unique Omelette” livens up a peaceful setting. On the foreshore, at the edge of a line of dunes, lies Ambleteuse-Plage in the Bay of the Slack, named after the river and its small natural dry harbour, which is covered only by the high tide.

The estuary shelters an oyster bed dominated by a few beach villas that, in the finer weather, are occupied by the Lille bourgeoisie who come for the fresh air and sea baths on a coast usually delivered up to the simple life of fishermen from a village set on the higher land of the hillside.

MaLoute Bréfort, 18, a young local lad – mussel harvester, fisherman and Slack ferryman – lives with his family in which all the men, his father and three brothers, are mysteriously anthropophagous. The Bréforts run rampant along the coast, seizing and devouring the upper classes of Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing and other bathers.

The disappearances leave the whole coast in turmoil and set in motion the police whose investigation is mangled by an almost certifiable and decidedly huge police inspector, Machin, and his assistant Malfoy.

On holiday for the summer months, a rich and snobbish family from Lille, the Van Peteghems – all degenerate and decadent from inbreeding – stagnates in a villa (in the Egyptian Ptolemaic style, the Typhonium, that overlooks the bay), not without mingling during their leisure hours of walking, sailing or bathing with the ordinary local people, MaLoute and the other Bréforts who, for their effort, would gladly devour them…

The mystified love of MaLoute and young Billie Van Peteghem is going to wreak havoc in these two families, shaking their convictions, foundations and way of life.