The Beast

Kingsnorth follows up The Wake with another daring novel. Edward Buckmaster has moved to a depopulated moor somewhere in England, having abandoned his wife and child a year earlier for a quasi-spiritual hermit existence. He wakes after a brutal storm with inexplicable lacerations on his side and a badly broken leg. As he wills himself to heal without assistance, he becomes obsessed with tracking a large, shadowy animal that he believes is stalking him. In between his meticulous searching, his thoughts become increasingly fragmented and he ignores all his bodily needs in his obsessive pursuit. Kingsnorth’s prose rushes on with a frenetic, almost unedited onslaught of garbled thoughts. This stream of consciousness works better if readers let it wash over them and take the slim book down in a single sitting. The blurring between reality and Edward’s distorted thinking is mostly effective, though the historical tangents don’t quite mesh with his disordered mind. Still, the novel richly rewards those who accept its demands with an impressionistic emotional wallop. (Aug.)