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PITY THE BEAST

Robin McLean

A feminist western that subverts all preconceived notions of the genre.

Millennia ago, Ginny's family farm was all grass and rock and wild horses. A thousand years hence, it'll all be peacefully underwater. In the matter-of-fact here and now, though, it's a hotbed of lust and resentment, because Ginny's just cheated on her husband with the man who lives next door. When a crowd of locals including Ginny's bitter sister Ella turn up to help out on the farm, a day of chores turns into a night of serious drinking, and then of brutal, communal retribution. By morning, Ginny's been left for dead. But dead is the one thing she isn't. With a stolen horse and rifle, she escapes into the mountains, and a small posse of her tormentors gears up to give chaseto bring her home and beg forgiveness, or to make sure she disappears for good? With detours through time, space, myth, and into the minds of a pack of philosophical mules, Pity the Beast heralds the arrival of a major new force in American letters. It is a novel that turns our assumptions about the West, masculinity, good and evil, and the nature of storytelling onto their heads, with an eye to the cosmic as well as the comic. It urges us to write our stories anewif we want to avoid becoming beasts ourselves. Robin McLean worked as lawyer and then a potter in the woods of Alaska before turning to writing. Her story collection Reptile House won the 2013 BOA Editions Fiction Prize and was twice a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Short Story Prize. She now lives and teaches in the high plains desert of central Nevada at Ike's Canyon Ranch Writer's Retreat which she co-founded. Her debut novel Pity the Beast will be published November 2, 2021 from And Other Stories. Her second story collection is forthcoming from And Other Stories too.

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Book Published 2021-11-02 by And Other Stories

Comments

Not since Faulkner have I read American prose so bristling with life and particularity.

Pity is in short supply in Pity the Beast, but compassion is not: set in the kind of country in which ploughs break against hidden rocks and running water is a girl sprinting with a bucket, it's a revenge narrative that never loses sight of the power of empathy, a love song to all of those animals domesticated for our support, a startlingly open-minded meditation on good and evil, a how-to manual on survival in the wilderness, a primer on how to negotiate all of the blind and ruthless violence we're forced to face in a world formed by trauma, and a passionate celebration of those small comforts that can and do get us through.

Like any western worth its salt, Pity the Beast abounds in fiction's elementals: muck and dirt and dust; flies and fire and shit; spirits both mythical and distilled; and, of course, fucking. McLean is a writer of the hard-scrabbled sacred and well-perfumed profane, and her grotesques cry out from their place there on the page. Behold, the heiress to Cormac McCarthyher pen to the old man's throat, her prose blood-speckled and sun-splattered and all her own.

McLean's novel is equal parts absurd and bleak, a startling story about survival, violence, and the thin divisions between animal and human, perfect for fans of dark, gritty Westerns.

Robin McLean writes scenes that feel as vibrant, terrifying, and wondrous as your most adrenalized memories. Her country is never merely the backdrop for human dramas but a living, breathing entity, alive with the poetry of mules and skittering stone. Pity the Beast is a thrilling ride and McLean's world feels so real that every cloud and creature in it casts a shadow.

A category-defying novel of revenge, survival, and transcendence . . . Raw and elemental, searing yet wry, [Pity the Beast] has much to say on law and lawlessness, sexual politics, and humans' animal nature.

The crux of this review is that PITY THE BEAST is a work of crazy brilliance. It's a worthy successor to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, and the rare book that creates more space for later writers to work in. Everything McLean does is interesting... PITY THE BEAST is hallucinatory and ribald and unaccountable, with serious things to say about society and the nature of mind. Read more...

Harrowing, gripping, the product of a deranged mind, Robin McLean's Pity the Beast is a brutally gorgeous fever-dream of a novel. This metaphysical Western feels like something new.

Mythic in scope and vision, ingenious in form and style, Pity the Beast is a magnificent work of art by a fearless and utterly original writer. I read it with wonder and terror, exhilaration and admiration.

I have never read a book that made evil seem so natural - which is both the most unsettling thing about this novel and its greatest accomplishment.

Robin McLean's gonna get you. She will take you out into deep, and then deeper, water.