Something very strange is in the air of the harmonious town of Quiquendone. The sleepy pace of life - in which municipal decisions are infinitely deferred and the average heartbeat rarely exceeds fifty beats per minute is starting to accelerate. Tempers flare and passions rise in Verne's brilliantly witty satire, while friends fall out, marriages are contracted in haste, and the entire community declared war on the neighbouring town over a three-hundred-year-old dispute involving a cow. Just who is the strange and shadowy doctor whose arrival seems bound up with these extraordinary developments? The mysterious Dr Ox watches his subjects' increasingly bizarre behaviour with the detached eye of the vivisectionist, a sinisterly manipulative figure who simultaneously echoes the great hubristic heroes of nineteenth-century horror fantasy, and foreshadows the ideological spectres of the twentieth century.