Felidae is the first book of the Felidae series, published in Germany in 1989. It has been adapted into a movie, and into a comic. It became a best-seller in Germany and it has been translated into multiple languages.
Plot synopsis:[]
Francis and his owner Gustav move into a neighborhood where Francis discovers that there are cats dying from an unnamed murderer. While investigating, the tom becomes friends with Bluebeard, a Maine-coon cat, Felicitas, a blind and wise she-cat, and Pascal, an old but intelligent tom cat. Francis also meets a cat named Kong who is always with two other cats being Hermann and Hermann.
Plot:[]
Discovering the Dead Bodies, Nightmares and Cats[]
Francis is a tomcat of an unnamed breed. His owner, Gustav, a trained archaeologist, decides to move into a poorly kept building that is in need of repairs with bad smells and rotting stuff. While going into the backyard, Francis meets a Maine-Coon cat named Bluebeard and not long after sees a deceased cat. Bluebeard is certain that a can opener (human) has killed Sacha and reveals to Francis that this is already the fourth dead body.
Soon afterwards, Gustav begins to renovate the run-down house together with one of his friends, Archibald Philip Purpur, also known as Archie. During the night, Francis gets a nightmare where he wanders through his house and enters a brightly lit room, he sees a faceless man and is gifted a collar by him. This turns out to actually be a chain and the man tries to whip Francis while the cat attempts to escape.
The following day, Bluebeard returns and leads Francis to another corpse, on the way to the corpse, the two are interrupted by the brothers Hermann and Hermann and their boss, the huge Colorpoint cat Kong. Kong tells Francis that they will soon have a get together. At the corpse, which is the old tomcat Deep Purple, Francis discovered Deep Purple was in the process of mating.
At night, Deep Purple appears in Francis's dream, throwing kittens around. While doing that, he talks about groundbreaking achievements in veterinary medicine.
The Claudandus Sect and Pascal[]
Francis wakes up in the middle of the night from his nightmare and he hears strange noises coming from the floor above the one he's on. He goes upstairs and observes a cult led by a large tomcat named Joker. The cult subjects themselves to electric shocks while worshiping "Claudandus". To get a better view, Francis goes one floor up and observes what is happening through a hole in the floor. He sees Kong, Hermann and Hermann, and Bluebeard. When Joker notices him, he sends the entire cult after the young tom. Francis flees the cult and ends up in the last floor of the house he was in, where he finds there was once a laboratory.
While running on roofs, Francis falls through a skylight into the home of a pretty Russian Blue cat named Felicitas, who is revealed to be blind. She gives Francis useful information, saying she heard the death cries. The victims were always on their way to cats in heat before someone they seemed to know well joined them. Felicitas could not understand the exact words, but his tone, which was insistent and laden with meaning, as if he wanted to convince the victims of something. She also says how she sees pictures in her mind of humans towering over her.
Bluebeard suddenly appears and Francis leaves Felicitas before confronting him about the Claudandus sect. Bluebeard dismisses it as a harmless time passer and thrill. He takes Francis to another "smart-ass" in the block, the old Havana cat Pascal, who seems to live in luxury, the old tom can even operate a computer. He keeps a database of all the residents of the district and also of the series of murders that have claimed five victims so far.
Francis notices that all the murder victims are European Shorthairs. Pascal denies that, because he has not yet entered the sixth victim, about whom Francis is not yet informed. When Francis asks who they are, Pascal reveals the newest victim was Felicitas. Francis runs back to her apartment with horror and sees that she is indeed dead with her owner mourning.
In his dream next, Francis is plagued by an apocalyptic vision with the district completely destroyed, overgrown with seemingly endless pea plants. In a brightly lit clearing, he sees the corpses of the district's cats. Suddenly a massive Gregor Johann Mendel rises out of the deceased bodies. Francis had previously seen Mendel in a portrait in Pascal's house. When Francis wakes up, he goes into the basement to hunt rats.
There he finds the diary of Professor Julius Preterius, who ran a laboratory in Francis's house in 1980, which Francis found on the last floor during the chase. In this laboratory, Preterius and his assistants Gray and Ziebold carried out experiments on cats in order to develop a wound adhesive. However, the experiment doesn't work, and the test animals die a miserable death. When the professor's funding is cut, he steals cats from the neighborhood to conduct experiments with while going crazy with alcohol and obsession. A nameless stray also comes to the lab.
In one of the many operations, Preterius, who has now gone completely mad, cuts the stray open and tries the wound glue on him. As if by a miracle, it works, and Preterius christens the stray "Claudandus" (Latin for "He who must be sealed"). But Claudandus is the only animal that the glue works on, and the professor repeatedly takes him apart, driving him completely crazy. Eventually, he believes Claudandus is speaking to him and lets him out of his cage for hand to hand combat, with Claudandus both winning and escaping the lab.
The Chase and Jesaja (Spoilers beyond this point!)[]
When Francis has finished reading the diary, Kong storms into the basement with Hermann and Hermann and a fight begins, after which Francis flees outside into the garden while it thunders. While fleeing, he discovers the corpse of a pregnant she-cat, who turns out to be Kong's lover Solitaire. Kong grieves over his mates death. A neglected looking cat is noticed hiding by Kong and he decides to chase them, but the cat manages to hide from Kong and the two brothers.
While they go looking for him in the other gardens, Francis follows the neglected cat through a narrow passage in the ground, into catacombs where hundreds of murdered cats lie. Although Francis initially suspects the cat, Jesaja, of being the murderer, it turns out that he only receives the dead. He is deeply religious and lived in Preterius' laboratory when he was younger. When he escaped from there, he was taken to the temple by Joker, where Joker taught him the teachings of the prophet of Claudandus. But Joker left him to spread the teachings in the area, and one day a murdered cat fell through the catacombs and Jesaja heard the voice of the prophet, who gave him the job to guard the dead. Since then, corpses, some horribly disfigured, kept coming into Jesaja's care, and the prophet kept speaking to him.
Since he hadn't been talked to by the prophet in a long time, Jesaja broke his rule and left the catacombs to look for dead bodies himself. He is upset because he thinks the prophet has abandoned him and he has been forgotten. Francis, who lets Jesaja keep his faith in the good prophet, leaves the catacombs again and goes home with the terrible realization of murders is that there are not just seven, but hundreds of murder victims leading back to years ago.
Trying to find Joker and the Meeting[]
During the night, Francis has a dream in which he sees the prophet, Claudandus, who calls him to follow him on his journey. When Francis wakes up, he is called to by a she-cat and meets the beautiful Nhozemphtekh, who reveals herself to be of no breed and claims that her race is both "old and new" after mating with her. Later that day, Francis wakes up and talks to Bluebeard for a while before sending the Maine-Coon to Joker's house to look for him while he goes to Pascal and presents his theories to him.
Bluebeard arrives with the information that Joker has disappeared, and since he was the main suspect of the case the trio assume that Joker has fled. In the following days, they use the list and statistics on the computer to find out who the murderer has previously killed, and they arrive at a number of over 400 murder victims. Based on the murder rate, they also find that the murderer has recently been killing more cats than he did a few years ago, and that the series must go back to the closure of the laboratory Francis has read about in 1981.
At a meeting, Francis and Pascal inform the residents of the district of their assumption that Joker is the escaped murderer. Joker's great-granddaughter Pepeline interrupts at the point where Francis explains that the prophet Claudandus died in Preterius' laboratory. She claims that her great-grandfather Joker told her that Claudandus killed Preterius, freed the test animals and survived himself.
In the evening, Francis personally visits Joker's house on the edge of the precinct. He climbs a tree to the roof of the building and he looks through the skylight, knowing he has the opportunity to look at the top shelves in the house that Bluebeard didn't look at, where he finds the executed Joker. However, it looks as if he agreed to his execution.
Francis's Realization and Confrontation (Heavy spoilers beyond this point!)[]
Back home, Francis finds Gustav, who is working on his book in the now completely renovated apartment. Francis sees a photograph of an ancient Egyptian painting and recognizes a cat that looks very similar to Nhozemphtekh. Suddenly he realizes that the cats in the block have been getting bred back to the more ancient breeds. The murderer is breeding the cats back according to the rules of the geneticist Gregor Mendel. Francis remembers that he had seen Mendel's portrait for the first time at Pascal's, and Pascal once mentioned the name of his owner: Ziebold, Preterius' assistant.
Francis goes to confront Pascal. Pascal reveals himself to the young detective that he is indeed Claudandus, the Claudandus who killed Preterius after the endless torture. He was eventually taken in by Ziebold and learned about Mendel's laws of inheritance through the library. Due to his excessive hatred of humans, he decided to breed a super race, an undomesticated "Felidae", with the help of Joker. If any of the cats of the Felidae breed did not want to stick to his plans, he had to kill them and bring them to Jesaja. However, he now has stomach cancer and could no longer drag the bodies to the temple.
He believes that he had found a worthy successor to the Felidae project to take after him with Francis. While Claudandus talks, Francis finds a secret file on the computer, in which all the murders are listed in detail. Francis wants to delete it, but Claudandus attacks him and pushes the computer screen off the table. The device implodes and a flash of flame sets the curtains on fire. In the burning room, Francis slits Pascal's throat and escapes despite being seriously injured.
In the end, Francis and Bluebeard are able to lure Jesaja out of the catacombs and temple to take him to a barkeeper where he ends up getting adopted by them. Francis keeps the identity of the murderer hidden to keep Pascal's memory as fond.
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