Summer ends, the season changes, andCoro, an artist frightened off by what her own paintings may represent, gets in her car anddrives for hours in the middle of the nightuntil she chances uponBetania, an isolated houseexisting in a world of its own. It’sanunfamiliarplace inhabited exclusively by women who,strangely,allseem to know her. Like adherents of an ancient cult,the womenof Betania alldress 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 Fowlis a novel about thethings that we do without knowing why, but that have an explanation that perhaps we willsome day come tounderstand.