The Beast Within

This book dented my head at a young age. Acquiring this from a used book sale when I was a pre-teen(!), I decided to take in what I assumed was to be another Monster story. What it is instead is a terrifying story about sexual awakening and our own inner demons. The story begins in the 1920s detailing the story of a couple in a loveless marriage, where the repressed wife is later seduced by a travelling bible salesman who brings sex into her life for the first time. Unfortunately her sexual awakening is cut short when her religious fanatic of a husband discovers the two in the barn....what happens afterwards is a tale of Horror as the salesman slowly devolves into something sub-human leading to one of the scariest Horror stories of the 1980s. I probally picked this up thinking it was somehow connected to the terrible 1982 film, but happily that is not the case. This story is it's own beast, both terrifying and highly reflective on humanity. A true thinking man's Horror piece it's a pity that the author did not deliver any further forays into such sexually driven Horror. A classic.

Edward Levy, The Beast Within (Berkley, 1981)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 extr

I loved THE BEAST WITHIN when I first read it in the early 80's. When I saw that it had been republished, I simply HAD to buy it and EXPERIENCE it all over again. It's WONDERFUL!!! If you enjoy nonstop horror that grabs you and holds you right from the first page, I certainly recommend THE BEAST WITHIN. My further advice is, if you like THE BEAST WITHIN as much as I did, be sure to get CAME A SPIDER (by the same author, Edward Levy). You won't be sorry!

GREAT WORK FROM EDWARD LEVY.......TOO BAD HE DIDNT WRITE MORE[TO MY KNOWLEDGE ONLY THIS AND ''CAME A SPIDER'',WHICH IS NOT AS GOOD].THE ONE FLAW I FIND IN THE BOOK IS THAT THE BEGINNING IS THE MOST POWERFUL PART OF THE BOOK,AND SO THE REST SEEMS BLUNTED BY COMPARISON.......BUT ITS WAY AHEAD OF THE SILLY EARLY EIGHTIES MOVIE OF THE SAME NAME.......YOU SHOULD TRACK DOWN A COPY OF THIS INSTEAD.

"The Beast Within" is a truly remarkable book. I recommend reading it because it has a profound meaning behind it, and will get you in touch with the beast within you.