Review: 'Beast' unleashes unsettling stories from writer of 'Cabin at the End of the World'

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 website, which indicates that it's horror but also "literary," "occult and supernatural," "thriller/supernatural" and "short stories." None of which sums up the feeling "Beast" gives you, which is less a terrified "I am never entering a dark room again" than, "Wow, what just happened? And why am I unnerved?"

"The Beast You Are" takes its title from the longest and least successful piece, a novella in verse that mashes up "Animal Farm" and "The Hunger Games." It's the cultish tale of a society in which animals live in harmony as long as they participate in regular sacrifices to a monster that lurks on the edge of their civilization. Tremblay's style does its part — the verse slows us down and injects us into his satirical world, where animals can be just as awful to each other as humans — but the payoff takes too long to arrive. (In notes at the end of "Beast," Tremblay indicates his impulse was, "Go ahead. Try it." Which is a good notion but maybe not at a length of 170 pages?)

The 14 short stories, though, are dazzling in a variety of ways. A couple of them have actual monsters but more often, characters work at jobs that make no sense. Or they go to parties where they feel unwelcome. Or they retell the story of finding a dead loved one, slightly altering the details each time until we're not sure if the alterations are lies or an attempt to keep the loss' wound open and sore.

The "try it" impulse pops up throughout "Beast" — in, for instance, "The Blog at the End of the World," which takes the form of comments on a blog, most of them as toxic as comments pages tend to be. But even when Tremblay uses more conventional formats, his unanswered mysteries and elliptical endings require us to figure out what happened and why it creeped us out.

In "Ice Cold Lemonade 25/Haunted House Tour: 1 Per Person," a boy visits a drinks stand operated by two neighborhood girls, only to learn they've shifted from peddling frosty beverages to giving guided tours through their suburban home, where they claim lots of terrifying things happened. When he revisits the house decades later, he remains unsure what took place there but knows it contributed to him becoming the "outcast adult" he is.

Tremblay has spoken admiringly of George Saunders' disquieting work and he dedicates one of his "Beast" stories to author Shirley Jackson, who knew about creating unease. Somewhere in there is what Tremblay is attempting — and the difficulty of pinning it down probably means he has accomplished exactly what he set out to do.

The Beast You Are
By: Paul Tremblay.
Publisher: William Morrow, 368 pages, $30.
Event: Wordplay, 4:30 p.m. July 8, 1011 Washington Av. S., Mpls, $20-$25.