The Beast Within HC Edward Levy Arbor House 1981 Book Club Edition

Description

Beast Within Hardcover
by Edward Levy (Author)

PREPARE TO MEET THE BEAST WITHIN

A lonely wife cheats.
A brutal husband gets revenge.

A not-so-innocent stranger hears a cellar door scrape shut—and begins twenty years of indescribable horror, chained in total darkness, feeding on live rats and human flesh, becoming himself the nightmare creature that lurks within us all…

Hardcover: 269 pages
Publisher: Arbor House Pub Co; First Edition

The Beast Within is the book that should have made Edward Levy a household name on a par with Stephen King and… well, okay, in 1981 Stephen King was really the only household name in horror. But the King was in one of his slumps, major presses were champing at the bit to sign AAA-league writers to produce the Next Big Thing. Well, Berkley already had Edward Levy, and here was the manuscript that was going to dethrone the horror master.

All well and good, and to Berkley’s credit, they didn’t handle the publicity all that badly. But then it was optioned for film…

If you’ve had the misfortune of seeing the atrocity that was Philippe Mora’s 1982 film of the same name, be assured that what you saw was not, in any way, what Edward Levy actually wrote. (One wag, in a review of the film version of The Beast Within, called it The Script Without. Indeed.) The following description of the novel, if you’re unlucky enough to actually remember the movie, will sound completely unfamiliar.

The scene opens in some past time. Say, sixty years ago, but in the rural area where the beginning of the story takes place, it might as well be six hundred years ago. A woman has been trapped in a loveless, arranged marriage with a Christian fundamentalist who makes Pat Robertson look like a godless heathen. A traveling Bible salesman (yes! Really!) shows up at the door, and you’ve all heard this joke a thousand times. Well, at least until the farmer catches them and chains the Bible salesman in his basement for years, treating him like an animal, until he actually becomes one. Levy sets the two men up against one another, one devolving, the other already devolved. These fifty pages (the fifty, of course, the filmmakers decided to cut out first) are some of the best writing in any eighties horror novel I’ve read (and I’ve read hundreds of them).

In any case, after the fundamentalist’s death (by natural causes), the beast finally has a chance to escape. Now, we all know he’s oversexed, and you know how sailors are after they’ve been on a ship for a year? Well, this guy’s been in the basement a lot longer, and when you’ve had to eat off the floor (with a rather unsavory menu) for a long time, you tend to lose some of the social graces. Let’s just say his escape and subsequent actions are not pretty, but they do produce a son, Michael MacCleary. All well and good. At least, until Michael reaches adolescence and becomes daddy’s boy…

The Beast Within was the first novel I read where the setup took longer than the actual action, and I couldn’t care less. After that first fifty-page whack to the head, Levy uses Carolyn (Michael’s mother)’s pregnancy and Michael’s early years solely to build suspense, taking up well over half the book’s full length, and he does so wonderfully. By the time you get to Michael’s teen years, the book would have to fall off a cliff to be bad. And it never does (certainly not to the “we had a few thousand extra in the special effects budget” way the film does). Levy takes the setup and delivers a climax that, well, let’s say if the rest of the book were plausible, the climax would be the most plausible way to resolve things. But you suspended disbelief when you realized the first part of the book was going to be based on a bad joke, right? You should have. If you did, The Beast Within is one of the most rip-roaring horror novel rides you are ever likely to take. Sits on the short shelf, with Russo’s Living Things, Trachtman’s Disturb Not the Dream, King’s Pet Sematary, and a very few other novels as one of the best horror novels of the eighties. It’s an old, and very overused, cliché. But really, you don’t want to finish this one late on a dark and stormy night.

Shelf wear. Very good condition.

0-825128668

Book is in near mint condition.