... suspenseful, disorienting ... where Mr. McCarthy is grandiose and portentous, Ms. McLean is strikingly down-to-earth. Her characters may amuse themselves with flights of philosophizing, but mostly they bicker, wisecrack and daydream, their behavior—crude but engaging, and often even endearing—so grippingly at odds with their drift into savagery. It sounds impossible but for all its horrors, there is little that is lurid about the writing in Pity the Beast. I have never read a book that made evil seem so natural—which is both the most unsettling thing about this novel and its greatest accomplishment.

Stunning ... [A] revisionist western ... The stuff of westerns from time almost-immemorial...but as it develops, we take a sharp turn into experimental metafiction, as the author begins self-consciously parodying the genre itself ... The whole thing eventually devolves into Quentin Tarantino–style violence, but it’s those first hyperrealistic sixty pages that stay with you, an opening so arresting that it stands apart and unbalances the rest of the novel ... Pity the Beast, at its best, suggests that women have always been the half-dead horse men beat because they hate themselves for being animals.

The book is extraordinarily capacious, often casually ranging in one paragraph through the experiences of all the animals in the scene. It travels back in geological time to the formation of the land on which the story takes place ... It’s full of casually perfect writing, especially about animals and nature ... The crux of this review is that Pity the Beast is a work of crazy brilliance. It’s a worthy successor to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, and the rare book that creates more space for later writers to work in. Everything McLean does is interesting. She writes dialogue in a way that’s truly ingenious, using it as a Greek chorus that often threatens to turn into music ... Convincingly mythic, and the many biblical references feel integral ... McLean explodes the idea of human society in the first scene, explicitly equating people with beasts, then spends the rest of the novel exploring what it is to be a beast, what it is to be a mind, what it is to be alive. In a literary environment dominated by safe, simple, realist prose, it’s thrilling to see a novel with this much intellectual heft and aesthetic fearlessness ... If I have any reservations, it’s that Pity the Beast is high gothic, and while it has the strengths of the form in spades, it also has its excesses ... The plot is a little incoherent, and the characters’ choices are motivated by metaphorical necessity, not by any recognisable psychology ... Sometimes, in the midst of an action scene, it becomes impossible to tell what’s happening as everything disappears behind a cloud of great writing. The grandest, most hyper-significant passages have one foot in meaninglessness ... I do tend, though, to find the gothic ridiculous – and for me, this book was a reminder that, when you make it work, it’s absolutely glorious. Pity the Beast is hallucinatory and ribald and unaccountable, with serious things to say about society and the nature of mind. It reminds you that stream-of-consciousness is fascinating in the right hands, that tastelessness is a power, and that plot is not the only thing fiction knows how to do. Every time you try to resist its charms, it knocks you down again with careless beauty. Even when it stumbles, it stumbles more gracefully than most books dance.

...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.

This punch-packing novel has a brutal opening ... The ambitious and innovative narrative moves through time, space and myth in order to explore a larger philosophical canvas beyond the immediate drama.

For any readers seeking their next Joy Williams-esque fix, look no further than Robin McLean’s mythic debut novel. With a polyphonic perspective that sweeps across millennia, Pity the Beast is a rip-roaring ride through the American West, an area of the country with no shortage of master chroniclers. Based on the instinctive talent on display here, you can add McLean’s name to that list.

McLean has created a vast, complicated structure that changes form: Pity The Beast has the feel of science fiction, using both an epistolary narrative and hinting at a morality tale surrounding the current climate emergency.

Exceptional books transcend the usual categories. Is Robin McLean’s Pity the Beast a modern-day western? Is it feminist? Is it postmodern? In fact it is all of these, and yet to pigeonhole it in such terms is reductive, and might, unfortunately, lead a reader to miss the complexity and richness of the novel ... The most outstanding feature of Pity the Beast, however, is the language ... This book is Hobbesian, bleak in vision, and if it’s not perfect, that’s because of its vast ambition. McLean is an important writer, one of the few who really matter at this precarious time in human history. She dares to think for herself, and to see things as they are, no matter how frightening that vision is.

[A] carnival of a novel, which seeks to present – and conceal – tragedy in a farrago of competing styles and registers ... Some of these strands are brilliant in their weirdness...others fall flat ... One explanation for McLean’s choice of such disparate modes is that she requires a disorientating, playful amalgam of styles to accommodate the unrelenting atrocities being carried out, both against her protagonist and the wider cast of characters, man and beast alike. Form mirrors content ... Pity the Beast occasionally reaches a McCarthyian pitch of incantatory power ... At times, however, Mclean’s style falters.

This grim novel of revenge has an ironic tone with the surreal touch of a fever dream—the narration dives into the far future, or adopts the point of view of the mules carrying the party’s supplies. McLean’s novel is equal parts absurd and bleak, a startling story about survival, violence, and the thin divisions between animal and human, perfect for fans of dark, gritty Westerns.

The story of the posse alternates with prehistoric myth, natural history, excerpts from an imaginary western, data from 22nd-century extraterrestrial botanists, and the wise 'thoughts' of superintelligent, telepathic mules. But, however provocative, these passages don’t manage to integrate with the main narrative. Raw and elemental, searing yet wry, this has much to say on law and lawlessness, sexual politics, and humans’ animal nature.

While it would be a mistake to call this novel a Western, it most definitely engages with ideas about the American West. McLean is innovative in reminding us that humans and other animals inhabit a landscape that other animals occupied first. The meanings we impose are, from the vantage point of life on Earth, neither inevitable nor universal. She is, however, hardly new in interrogating cowboy mythology, and it’s hard to not see some of her choices as redundant. It’s clear, for example, that her use of the word Indian conveys a perspective and that her characters’ conversations about Indigenous people tell us something about them. But there’s a point at which an omniscient narrator that’s casually racist becomes a slap in the face. And readers will have to decide for themselves if they want to know what comes next in a novel that spends its first 65 pages recounting the ugly details of a single night that ends with a woman being gang-raped and thrown into a pit filled with lime on top of a stillborn foal ... Ambitious, inventive, and aggressively repellent.