Description

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 chase-to 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 anew-if we want to avoid becoming beasts ourselves.

Publisher Review

‘Not since Faulkner have I read American prose so bristling with life and particularity.’ J M Coetzee—-‘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.’ Jim Shepard—-‘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.’ Chris Bachelder—-‘Robin McLean’s gonna get you. She will take you out into deep, and then deeper, water.’ Noy Holland, author of Spectacle of the Body and I Was Trying to Discover What It Feels Like—-‘Robin McLean sees the world like no one I’ve ever read before. In PITY THE BEAST, her exacting eye gives us human behavior in all of its beastliness while simultaneously reminding us that it’s not moral judgment that ugliness calls for, it’s even more careful attention. McLean insists that if we face the worst of ourselves, and if we find some way to articulate what we see, we may emerge battered but filled with a compassion we didn’t know we had, and didn’t know we needed.’ Karen Shepard, author of An Empire of Women and What Have We Done—-‘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.’ Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Swamplandia! and Orange World and Other Stories—-‘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.’ Sabina Murray, author of The Human Zoo and Valiant Gentlemen—-‘Not since I stood in a Washington D.C. bookstore back in 1992 to read the first few pages of All the Pretty Horses, have I known so quickly and surely that I was in the hands of a writer whose skills and sensibilities soared in a direction both thrilling and foreign to me at the same time. But where Cormac McCarthy uses his gifts to solidify the west we have always known – men on the edge, defining and redefining freedom – Robin McLean turns the tables on him (and us) by putting a woman in charge. Though Pity the Beast is, through and through, a feminist novel, however, there isn’t a sentence in it that preaches, not a word that calls attention to its political undercurrents. Robin McLean may be a literary newcomer, but in years to come we might be calling her a literary master.’ Richard Wiley, author of Soldiers in Hiding