The Royal Hunt is distinguished by its penetrating exploration of the psychology of mass terror, and by its mythic projection of terror's dehumanizing effects on both individuals and entire communities. In a kaleidoscopic reconstruction of a physician's memories of the traumatic experiences of his childhood, the protagonist as a young boy discovers the wonders of sex, love and friendship against a sinister background of crime and terror that threatens to engulf the entire community of which he is a part.
For reasons that remain obscure, Kalagherovich, a county-level official of the Communist Party, is targeted for extermination and is therefore accused, in the classic manner, of being the 'agent of a foreign power'. He disappears mysteriously, and strange happenings occur in the lives of those involved in the plot, which manipulate events behind the scenes by exploiting what seems to be the sudden outbreak in the community of an epidemic of rabies. Inhuman violence erupts. Instinctive drives takeover. Monstrous forms of desire are indulged. And a panic that may or may not be the true (and only) epidemic disease, and that is somehow contracted in morbid fear of its contagion, comes to grip the entire community.