“The Wage of Fear” is one of the best works of the modern French writer Georges Arnault. The film based on this novel was a great success. But, as often happens, the film did not exhaust the full depth of the work. The reader will find pictures of the life of the port town of Las Piedras, cut to the roots by the American oil company Crud, new facets of the characters' characters, and the author's reflections in the published chapters of the novel. Passions, hopes, defeats of unlucky adventurers in a battle with life, the tragic fate of a man of extraordinary abilities who in other conditions he could become a hero, but in an environment of capitalist predation he follows the path of moral devastation - this is the content of the novel.