Summary
A soot-choked fever dream hurtles along iron arteries: Jacques Lantier, the titular beast, pilots the locomotive “La Lison” with piston-pumping lust, the whistle’s shriek substituting for the scream he muzzles inside. Heredity has stitched a hair-trigger into his nerves—grandfathers who guillotined lovers, a mother who smiled while setting fire to her bridal veil—so every passing woman ignites a tremor of possible slaughter. The engine’s brass and steel become surrogate flesh: he polishes her rods as if anointing a mistress, presses his cheek to her scalding flank to stifle the urge to press his hands around a throat. Into this clanking Eden slithers Séverine, the station-master’s restless wife, her gaze already derailing marriages; she senses in Jacques a mirror for her own appetite for catastrophe. Their collision is choreographed in smoke and steam: a clandestine embrace in the marshalling yard while rain hisses on coals, a kiss that tastes of coal-dust and copper. Each rendezvous tightens the spring of Jacques’s mania; he hallucinates wheels shrieking “kill, kill,” sees signal lamps turned blood-red by the mere flicker of Séverine’s eyelash. When her husband is found near the tracks, skull cracked like an egg, the whole town whispers “accident,” but Jacques’s pupils widen with recognition—he cannot recall whether he loosened the rail bolts or merely dreamed it. The final reel becomes a lurid Stations of the Cross: Jacques dragging Séverine into the cab for a hurtling midnight run, throttle jammed full, iron horse screaming toward an abyss only he can see. He raises a wrench, hesitates, lowers it, raises again while the speedometer needle quivers at the edge of delirium. Cut to black, then the single headlamp carving a cone of light that catches the frantic semaphore of Séverine’s pale hands before the screen combusts into white-hot nothingness.
Synopsis
Jacques Lantier, the "human beast" of the title, has a hereditary madness and has several times in his life wanted to murder women. At the beginning of the story he is an engine driver, in control of his engine "La Lison". His relationship with "La Lison" is almost sexual and provides some degree of control over his mania.
