Gaspésie, 1911. The village of La Frayère has a new postman, Victor Bradley, from Paspébiac, a boastful redhead with minnow eyes. His arrival reminds a trick player named Monti Bouge of the promise of revenge he made to himself as a child, lying in a star shape on the ice with a puck stuck in his mouth. Between them, a war of cunning and mischief breaks out, a war that goes on for life and beyond death. But first it takes Monti away from his home, to a lost Klondike from where he returns sewn of gold and transformed. And with more enemies. He will have plucked Americans in a poker game defying the laws of probability as well as those of nature itself: a shimmering beast has sprung from the cards and now precedes him wherever he goes, each of his appearances a sign. Under his influence, Monti sets about developing his village and gives free rein to his excesses - ambition, eccentricities, alcohol - which his descendants will suffer the repercussions.
Nearly a century later, his grandson François, an obsessive and stalked historian, already at the end of his rope at the age of thirty, is convinced that the hereditary alcoholism that weighs on the Bouge has its origins in a curse. He intends to prove it and free himself from it at the same time. One night he tears himself away from his Montreal exile and returns, under a Homeric storm, to his native Gaspésie, which has remained fabulous for him. But a darker reality awaits him in La Frayère: a fantastic hunt has begun - to believe that Monti’s ultimate fantasy of capturing his beast will come true.
