RaveCleveland Review of Books...warrants the label \'eco-feminist Western\'—eco- because it privileges non-human perspectives and timeframes; feminist because the male characters, though vividly drawn and often center stage, are ultimately incidental to the underlying feud and affinity between two women ... A reader attuned to coincidence begins to suspect that things are not just things, in this novel, but foils for a plot spun in part from multivalent words ... Pity the Beast shows the virtue in the caricature: its drama and its language are inextricable, and it raises animal fables to mature tragedy. Crude moralism is the story, as characters spar in stichomythic, punchy lines ... The hybrid narrative advances sure-footed as the pack of mules, so that we accept whatever comes our way ... The wheeling-and-dealing narrative sheds what’s stale in fiction’s conventions and restores dimension to what autofiction flattens out. Here, interiority is gleaned through movement, backstory through myth-making, plot through evasion, morals through chasms ... McLean shows what fiction can do beyond shape and select found material. Her novel is a radically made thing, built sentence by clear sentence, each loaded ominously yet comically, always this razor’s edge, with shifting symbolic potential. The tension never lets up ... Pity the Beast shows what fiction can do that nothing else can: enact the etymology of such questions. It’s a brilliant, comic, tragic novel...but its greatest brilliance is the way it sends us back into ourselves, as catharsis is meant to: moving us from laughter to compassion, transforming pity and fear into wonder.
