“Not since Faulkner have I read American prose so bristling with life and particularity.” —J. M. Coetzee
“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.” —Sandra Newman, The Guardian
“Pity the Beast is one of those that takes off the top of your head, both with its cascading verbal brilliance, and the power with which it employs our archetypes of violence, pursuit and survival. It’s as real as a dream in which every impossible thing arrives already known yet glinting with new meaning, like a fire.” —Jonathan Lethem
“This updated Western has echoes of Cormac McCarthy, but its primitive violence is familial and familiar rather than Gothic and bizarre. . . . Ms. McLean is strikingly down-to-earth. Her characters may amuse themselves with flights of philosophizing, but mostly they bicker, wisecrack and daydream, their behaviour—crude but engaging, and often even endearing—so grippingly at odds with their drift into savagery. It sounds impossible but for all its horrors, there is little that is lurid about the writing in Pity the Beast. 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.” —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“Pity the Beast is bold, asperous, and defiant.” —Cynan Jones
"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
“Pity is in short supply in Pity the Beast, but compassion is not . . . 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
“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
“Here is a novel that sets the species down in its proper plain place: talking animal. Late Bloomer to the Big Window. Robin McLean is unafraid of the grand scale, wary of the luxury of mercy. I read Pity the Beast ravenously, stunned by its savage and glorious turns.” —Noy Holland
“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 McCarthy—her pen to the old man’s throat, her prose blood-speckled and sun-splattered and all her own.” —Hal Hlavinka, Community Bookstore, Brooklyn
“Before I'd even finished reading the first chapter I knew that Robin McLean had made an indelible mark on American literature. Pity the Beast sees an unfaithful and unrepentant wife brutally punished and hounded from her home by family and community, setting off a phantasmagoric, slow-motion chase across the landscape of the West. Linguistically rich and rife with fuliginous humor, it re-excavates the ground worked long before by Shirley Jackson and Cormac McCarthy, but creates something unrecognizably new from the ancient bones buried there.” —James Crossley, Madison Books, Seattle
“Like a giant mural of the American West, cosmic and brutal in its scope while simultaneously beautiful and vulnerable. Makes use of the terse style of many cowboy narratives to turn the entire genre on its head to tell a feminist story of revenge and nature, myth and joketelling. Wild, surprising, and dizzyingly captivating.” —Luis Correa, Avid Bookshop
“Like a film that occasionally skips, this dark and brooding chase through the wilds peeks around present acts of sudden violence, long contemplation, and travel through a landscape that is not interested in human activity into the past, the future, & the disconnected timeless spaces of myths. Imagine Annie Proulx directed by David Lynch. A western for people who realize "The Old West" is a fairy tale.” —Josh Cook, Porter Square Books
“Pity the Beast is a sharp-edged novel, with sentences lined with broken glass. It is merciless as the Old Testament and tender as raw meat. Mostly, though, it's a living, bucking thing that takes the reader for a wild ride into a landscape bristling with elemental forces.” —Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books
“An epic adventure that subverts any and all preconceived notions of the Western genre. McLean twists the sharpest edges of gender, philosophy, and the landscape itself into a compassionate meditation on what it really means to survive.” —Josie Smith, Madison Street Books
