Formalist Horrors and Talking Animals: Paul Tremblay s The Beast You Are tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Chris Hewitt, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“The Beast You Are” by Paul Tremblay; William Morrow (368 pages, $30)
The cover image of Paul Tremblay’s “The Beast You Are” with a wolf chomping down on t.
The cover image of Paul Tremblay's "The Beast You Are" - with a wolf chomping down on the head of a boar - screams "horror." But the genre-busting book from the writer of "The Cabin at the End of the World" may require a new category.
Publisher William Morrow acknowledges as much on the book's we
The 15 pieces in THE BEAST YOU ARE are all monsters of a kind, ready to loudly (and lovingly) smash through your head and into your heart. In “The Dead Thing,” a middle-schooler struggles to deal with the aftermath of her parents’ substance addictions and split. One day, her little brother claims he found a shoebox with “the dead thing” inside, but he won’t show it to her. In “The Last Conversation,” a person wakes in a sterile, white room and begins to receive instructions via intercom from a woman named Anne. When they are finally allowed to leave the room to complete a task, what they find is as shocking as it is heartbreaking. The title novella is a mini epic in which the destinies and secrets of a village, a dog and a cat are intertwined with a giant monster that returns to wreak havoc every 30 years.