by Sheri Tepper
Even if you have read any other Sheri Tepper, I believe this one is one of her best works. I haven't read much but of the style I recognized in the others I think she achieved it best here. Tepper has an amazing way of weaving stories together and a way of representing creatures in an almost fantastic light through certain characteristic in lieu of describing them completely. I always love this ghost like quality, and almost undiscribable entity, it gives her books so much more place for a reader to imagine in.
In this story, science fiction as I have just realized I forgot to say, we are many many years into the future of humanity. The people dominating the universe are a kind of upperclass-like European families. There has been a kind of deriving of the church and it has evolved into something called the 'Sanctity' and a plague is wiping out the human race.
However there is one place that is not touched. In old english mannered manors live the families of the planet Grass, called that way because that's pretty much all that grows there. Like the English of our time the people practice fox hunting. But this world is not what it seems.
The Foxes are giant creatures, ferocious and unstopabble, seperated from the humans by a wall. When the hunt it called it is the Mounts that come to the people and not the people who go and get their mounts, but these tall toothy creatures aren't what you would usually ride. And the blood red eyes of the vicious Hounds are enough to chill you to the bone. Fox Hunting it may be called but this hunt is carried out with the aliens that populated the planet of Grass before humans got there.
And now, everyone else in the universe wants to know why they aren't catching the plague.
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