Beast

Book Purchased Under BCOM Funds @ Rs. 599/- with bill no: 368,dtd: 18/01/2024

To read Beast is a joy. Prose and gaze are inseparable, and Kingsnorth's gaze is so intense it forces a similar intensity from the reader. The smallest shift of the light puts us on edge, on our mettle. Will something terrible happen? The moor, an empty church, an empty lane with something glimpsed swiftly crossing it - all are so menacing because they are so minutely themselves. There's a kind of aching attentiveness necessary to read Beast, but the narrative easily brings it out in you, and the reward is obvious. The more of Kingsnorth's intensity you survive, the more you can manage: in the end, your gaze has become as minutely focused as his hermit's. You feel alive. -- M John Harrison ― Guardian

With its ruggedly handsome descriptions of nature and portentous spiritual self-reflection, Beast feels like Robert Macfarlane re-written by Cormac McCarthy . . . the spell is never broken. -- Sameer Rahim ― Telegraph

Beast continues Kingsnorth's powerful exploration of the connection between people, place and prose . . . this is a novel bravely wrestling not only with the bestial, but with what it is that makes us human. -- Anita Sethi ― Observer

Kingsnorth's style is a kind of ancient modernism, and he's really the only writer doing anything like it. His taste for self-isolation has produced writing that is both powerful and singular - Beckett doing Beowulf. -- Nick Richardson ― London Review of Books

[E]eerily arresting . . . the book brings to mind such films as Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man and Michael Reeves's Witchfinder General . . . [T]here is much potent writing, calm wisdom and quiet understanding in this book. Beast offers a message for the future as well as a robust challenge to the present. -- Jonathan Barnes ― Literary Review

Although written in our tongue, the language is still relentless, even brutal . . . [a] strange, elusive book. -- Philip Womack ― Spectator

A portrait of the psyche in gaunt, glittering transcendence. -- Jay Griffiths

I was totally absorbed by it - the way in which Edward and his fractured psyche is subsumed into the woozy landscape of the moors was artfully done. -- Benjamin Wood, author of The Bellwether Revivals

Beast is as timeless as it is urgent. Buckmaster emerges as an almost knightly figure, even as his words are ripped from his grasp. The story left behind is spare and unflinching and beautiful. -- William Atkins, author of The Moor

Kingsnorth's wilderness is a predator. It crouches, half-snarling, half-smiling at our door. There's only one thing worse than meeting it, and that is not meeting it. Kingsnorth is one of the only writers alive with the nerve to look it in the eye and with the hard, taut words to describe what he sees. Like The Wake before it, Beast is an urgent, vital, terrifying triumph. -- Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast

Beautifully formed, Beast has the purity of an ancient fable with blinding flashes of what it means to be alive today. -- Harry Parker

English