Alexey Viktorovich Ivanov

Three young Muscovites take a side job in a remote village in the Volga region: they need to remove a deteriorating fresco from the wall of an abandoned church. The fresco depicts a heretical image of Saint Christopher with a dog’s head. It turns out that in the old days, the village was a schismatic skete, and the side job was an experiment by mysterious denziologists, the “sappers” of world culture. And in the haze of peat fires, lost historical memory gives rise to a terrifying Doghead—either a demon of the schismatics or a god of the camp guards.If you like, it’s a genre novel, a werewolf horror story. If you like, it’s new village prose. If you like, it’s a stylization of web-surfing on the topic of the Russian schism. But overall, “Dogheads” is a story about the invisible boundaries of culture and the guardians of these boundaries. Every society has a certain circle of beliefs, and society does not allow a person to leave this circle, and if a person dares to step beyond the sacred limit, monsters give chase.Kirill watched, spellbound, as these wild creatures came out into the middle of the bridge and stopped, began to turn their heads, sniff the air. They clearly smelled people somewhere nearby, like dogs. If it weren’t for the smell of peat smoke, no one would have been safe from the Dogheads.The design of the series is an art project in which all of Alexey Ivanov’s novels are designed by artists working in very different styles—as different as the novels themselves.