Completed a short but interesting novel tonight by an unknown author by the name of Edward Levy, and it is titled "The Beast Within".
So here the story is set in the Ozark Mountain region in the Northwest area of Northwest Arkansas, it starts off with an act of cheating between the wife of a very brutal husband and a salesman, leading to the husband enacting a horrific instance of revenge that ends with the salesman being imprisoned in the cellar for twenty years. And during those years the not-so-innocent salesman becomes increasingly insane and turns into something that is less than human.
Soon he breaks loose and in the process would come to cross pass with a newly married couple and irrevocably change their lives, and leave a legacy that would haunt them.
This is a short book but the contents of it are extremely dark and extremely brutal. I mean there are some pretty gruesome moments in it along with some very spicy moments too. And all done in a very surprising literary way even. That is most likely because of the research that Levy did while he worked on it, which included lycanthropy, parapsychology, animal telepathy (interestingly enough) and Ozark mountain folklore.
And since I mentioned lycanthropy here, yes this is Levy's own take of the werewolf trope in horror. I think I would put this novel in the psychological horror category with a bit of a supernatural twist. Some of the characters that initially appear in the story, especially in the first part of it, aren't particularly that sympathetic, but the young family, the MacCleary's, I really feel for, especially in regards with what is happening to their only son. This is a particularly short but very sharp novel, done in a very literary way. And it of course only one of two novels, that I know of, that Levy had written. The other, "Came A Spider" I might have to track down.
Oh,and as a side note, I do live in the Northwest region of Arkansas in the Ozarks, and I kind of wonder what folktales, particularly in the Ozarks, Levy used as one of the key basics for this novel?
by i-the-muso-1968