Kate’s Review: “The Beast You Are: Stories”

This post may contain affiliate links for books we recommend.  Read the full disclosure here.

Book: “The Beast You Are: Stories” by Paul Tremblay

Publishing Info: William Morrow, July 2023

Where Did I Get This Book: I received an eARC from NetGalley.

Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound

Book Description: Paul Tremblay has won widespread acclaim for illuminating the dark horrors of the mind in novels and stories that push the boundaries of storytelling itself. The fifteen pieces in this brilliant collection, 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. He won’t show it to her and he won’t let the box out of his sight. 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, “The Beast You Are,” 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 thirty years.

A masterpiece of literary horror and psychological suspense, The Beast You Are is a fearlessly imagined collection from one of the most electrifying and innovative writers working today.

Review: Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this collection!

It is always a good reading day when Paul Tremblay comes out with a new book, and my eyes are constantly peeled for a new title by him. I am so pleased that Tremblay is becoming more and more well known, what with the successful adaptation of his novel “The Cabin at the End of the World” hitting theaters this past winter. When I saw that he had a new book called “The Beast You Are” coming out, and that it was a short stories collection of previous works (as well as a novella), my usual nervousness about short stories didn’t even phase me. I trust Tremblay. And I was right to do so, because this is, on the whole, a good collection.

I will do the usual set up of talking about my three favorite stories, and then talk about the book as a whole.

“I Know You’re There”: This is one of the earliest stories in the collection, and it is almost certainly my favorite because of how ambiguous and heartbreaking it is. We follow Silas Chen as he works through the grief of losing his husband David to a sudden death, having found his body upon arriving home from work. As he tells the story to different people, aspects of if change, but one thing remains the same: Silas wasn’t sure if David’s dead body was staying completely still. There is a bittersweetness as well as an unease as we hear multiple iterations of Silas finding his dead husband, and the reader wonders if Silas is lying, or if his grief and sudden solitary life has led to him misremembering due to trauma, but the creepy descriptions of a body perhaps moving just a little bit, in various ways, when one’s back is turned, settled into my brain as I was reading it. As was the wonder about how grief makes it so that perhaps a departed loved one lingers in one way or another. Really unnerving, but also very emotional.

“The Blog at the End of the World”: We read a blog whose owner is talking about a mysterious disease that is making people drop dead, starting from what seems to be the end of the world and working backwards to earlier days when it’s just rumors and whispers, starting from the end and moving back towards the start. Tremblay wrote this one back in 2008, a good twelve years before COVID came into the picture and misinformation spread online like wildfire, so reading this was a bit surreal (and in the story notes he mentions it was surreal revisiting it now) because it almost predicted the way people would talk over each other, sow distrust, and disbelieve each other as things were falling apart around them. I loved the structure of this one, as it does read like a LiveJournal from the mid to late 2000s, and it was pretty neat getting the story told in this epistolary way (there is also a hilarious moment in the comments with a clear spam bot, man do I remember those days!).

“The Dead Thing”: An early teenage girl whose parents have split up due to substance abuse issues notices that her younger brother has come home clutching a box to his chest. When she asks what he has, he tells her that it’s just some dead thing but won’t show her. But something in the box is pulsing, and as he keeps it hidden and she becomes more and more curious, the thing begins to grow… This was one of the bleakest stories in the bunch, and honestly it kind of got to me in a not so good way, but I wanted to include it because 1) the stream of consciousness style really added to the reading experience, setting me on edge almost from the start and capturing the haphazard and spiraling situation at hand, and 2) I kept thinking about the 1980s remake of “The Blob” as I was reading. And that’s probably why it got to me because that movie just…. UGH. If you truly get to me (without triggering me, I should add, because that I DON’T like), I gotta give you props.

The collection as a whole is very broad and varied, with Tremblay doing straight up horror, to dark fantasy, to flash fiction, and beyond. What struck me the most about the stories is that a lot of them feel like they are pushing boundaries and looking to be experimental. There is the aforementioned “The Dead Thing” and its stream of consciousness narrator, or a meta pseudo-“Fangoria” column homage “The Postal Zone: The Possession Edition” that reads like it is the actual Fangoria magazine column ‘The Postal Zone’ (and was actually published in Fangoria, THE LAYERS OF THIS STORY). But the biggest experimentation was the lion’s share of the book, the titular novella “The Beast You Are”, in which Tremblay has created a new world with anthropomorphic animals who are going up against a monster that takes a sacrifice every thirty years. The way that Tremblay goes beyond the expected is what makes this book so interesting, and while some stories didn’t work as well for me as others did, I really did appreciate the way that he went outside the box.

“The Beast You Are” is a strong short stories collection that really shows off Paul Tremblay’s range. How great to see stories new and old gathered in one place, and to see the places the author is willing to go across so many tales.

Rating 8: Creative, bittersweet, experimental, and unsettling, “The Beast You Are” is a varied mix of stories by one of the most interesting horror authors writing today.

Reader’s Advisory:

“The Beast You Are” is included on the Goodreads list “Horror to Look Forward to in 2023”.