Beasts

by Joyce Carol Oates

Book Overview

A young woman tumbles into a nightmare of decadent desire and corrupted innocence in a superb novella of suspense from National Book Award-winner Joyce Carol Oates. Art and arson, the poetry of D. H. Lawrence and pulp pornography, hero-worship and sexual debasement, totems and taboos mix and mutate into a startling, suspenseful tale of how a sunny New England college campus descends into a lurid nightmare. "A small gem.... Oates does not disappoint,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786711035
• ISBN13: 9780786711031
• Release Date: November 2002
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.0" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

guilty pleasure

so beautifully written, unpredictable. And yes "not a word wasted".

Led me to sin...

Beasts crept up on me, then carried me off in its evil little teeth. Did it REALLY lead me to sin? Oh yes. Grievously. In fact, I was so anxious to see what happened next, I caught myself stealing a few sentences while driving. (Well, I HAD stopped for a red light.)The story is not new: A college student with a professorial crush learns all about the relativity of morality--and learns it the hard way. So what makes this version of an old standard so good?Form? Breaks every rule, yet works. Flashbacks within flashbacks, yet you can't wait for the next page.Plot? Straightforward, yet masterful. (Check out the delicious twist at the end of the third chapter!) Builds with understatement, until you're screaming for the resolution. You get what you scream for, too. Satisfaction.Characterization? Yes! The naivete of the protagonist balanced by the perspective of her mature counterpart. Whom you don't trust. At first. Brilliant! No indulgent and annoying digressions into secondary characters, either. If you like subtle psychological thrillers and can live without gunshots and fistfights for a couple of hours (well, there is a knife), this book will become one of your favorites.

Yet another almost perfect novel from JCOates.

Joyce Carol Oates, Beasts (Carroll and Graf, 2002)Joyce Carol Oates cannot be human.It is simply impossible for a single human being to turn out the work she has over the course of her career, consistently stratospheric in both quality and quantity. Her thirty-year bibliography is so vast that the major internet repository of Oates research and criticism doesn't have a full list anywhere, but is now a searchable database. Another admittedly incomplete bibliography on the web lists eighty-nine books split between novels, short story collections, and poetry, fifteen anthologies she has edited or co-edited, ten works of non-fiction, and ninety anthologies in which her work has appeared since 1980 (and those are only the horror-themed anthologies). She is the Merzbow of literature, the Sun Ra of wordcraft, both the dream and the nightmare of the bibliophile with a limited reserve of cash. The truly astounding part of all this is that one can walk into a (very well-stocked) bookshop, pick up a Joyce Carol Oates book at random, and have an odds-on chance of being rewarded with one of his finest reads of the year. Now add to this idea the fact that Oates is, for all intents and purposes, a one-trick pony, and explain how one person can write so much material on a single theme and still have it come out so very, very well.Such is certainly the case with her recent novel Beasts. Anyone who's read Oates before, in whatever form, is liable to know a few things about this book even before cracking the cover: the main theme of the book will be human degradation. One of the characters in the book will be horrified by the degradation, even while experiencing it, and this horror will cause the character to commit some sort of extreme and socially unacceptable act. There will be a great deal of uncomfortable eroticism. Then you open the book, read the first two small chapters, and here's something new: Oates is going to tell you all this in the first four pages. It's almost as if she's throwing down the gauntlet to the reader; "you know it's coming, I know it's coming, let's see how much I can give you at the beginning and still beguile you with my novel."And utterly beguiling it is. Gillian Brauer is a student at a small college in Massachusetts who is enamored of one of her professors. She is not alone in this, but the lengths to which she goes in her obsession with him are rather farther than the others go (in one early scene, she surreptitiously follows his wife through town, and mentions she has done this a number of times before). She knows that sometimes the professor and his wife, a sculptor whose most recent show at the school's gallery has ignited a firestorm of outrage, will sometimes allow students into their inner circle, but that these students are very tight-lipped about what goes on there. Secret society stuff at its best. Gillian, too shy to confess her love for her professor and desire to be one of those students, begins to imagine that all of h

can't stop thinking about it!

This book is haunting my thoughts days after i read it.In 138 pages, there's not much room for action to occur - but the characters are developed just enough so you feel like you know them - but just too little that they remain mysterious and can surprise you.It takes place on a college campus - in a woman's dorm - and in a poetry class. All of the students fall madly in love with the teacher - but the narrator also becomes fascinated and intrigued by his wife. The couple takes an interest in several of the girls - which excites them at first but ends up disastrous.This book shows true human nature, which many people like to ignore. Joyce Carol Oates portrays people as beasts, no different than the ones that the scupltress-wife creates - which disgust and repulse the town as well as the narrator.Most of this book is slow with little action and then the ending is explosive and left me thinking for days. This little novella is incredible once it has time to sink in!

Gothic Theater of the Macabre

In yet another chilling tale of the grotesque and macabre, Joyce thrills her readers with a truly fine psychological tale. Overtly referencing D.H. Lawrence, one of the fathers of the genre, and one of Oates favorite writers, the book leads the reader through the mind of a young college coed, who to one extent or another, becomes lost and obsessed in the world of human feeling and sexuality, even depraved sexuality.The tale is highly autobiographical, and it is interesting to try and separate the fictional Joyce from the real one. Her love of D.H. Lawrence and literature in general, mixed with the college campus atmosphere with which she is so familiar. The exquisite detail of the anorexic condition which Joyce has been a victim of personally, along with her tachycardia. All these things, combined with emotions portrayed in a manner, that is purely unique to Joyce's work. Yet, not uncommonly, Joyce ends with the death or murder of some of her characters. This situation is not unusual for her. It is the manner in which the protagonist is drawn to create this conclusion that makes the book so precisely a Joyce Carol Oates novel, or perhaps it should better be called a novella. Running only 138 pages, the book does not give us the extreme level of character development that many of her books do. Yet, somehow, she is able to paint a truly clear and tangible, even palpable feeling of her protagonist and the mental processes that she experiences. Perhaps, drawing heavily on self experiences is the key to her wonderful articulation in such a limited number of words. For those who are familiar with her work, this book will not be a disappointment. Interestingly, she portrays women as the Beasts here, which is not typical, yet also not atypical of her Gothic style. Even her supporting characters have various, unclean and often nefarious intent. Yet she focuses the reader on the central character, which in many ways, is herself. In her style, she is the undisputed master, and this book is no exception. It is highly recommended for readers of Gothic tales, and any reader of Joyce Carol Oates will find this book one of great illustrative significance.

Carved Lives

Beasts is a gothic novella set in a small New England woman's college in the 70s. It is told through the perspective of Gillian Brauer, a yearning student poet who is infatuated with her D. H. Lawrence loving professor Andre Harrow and his controversial and mysterious sculptress wife, Dorcas. Several mysteries including recurring acts of arson, a coveted but secret apprenticeship to the radical Dorcas and several students who are debilitated by mental illness are balanced through the book. The characters explore the moral boundary of the liberal time period through their sexual explorations, but this isn't a novella that seeks to exploit the titillating age of free love. Rather, it reinvents the tale of Bluebeard to create a contemporary fable of the grotesque.This novella explores the deadly consequences of a train of thought taken too far, viciously seeking out the passionate ends of extended thoughts. Harrow and his wife take the liberal sexual attitude of DH Lawrence and act out the extreme barriers of it. Gillian enigmatically buries her responsibility in the events of her early life while simultaneously plotting the motives which form her guilt. Somehow she is left centrally pure, a passionate girl spoiled by ideas. Oates draws out the violent inner natures of her characters to show them in the light, exposing the consequences of their nature. This novella isn't subtle, Oates chooses instead to go for the extreme to show us our forgotten nightmares. It is a powerful and memorable read.