Name: Bryan Alexander's review of Dread in the Beast by Charlee Jacob
Item: Dread in the Beast
Rating: 4
Author: Bryan Alexander

Charlee Jacob

BRAM STOKER AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL OF 2005DREAD IN THE BEAST used to be a novella about the goddess of waste and the king of wasters. Now it is a novel, stuffed full of the gruesome and horrible. Taken from the mythologies and histories of humankind, it follows the trail of the Mother Spririt of the worst that the world is capable of producing. From the catacombs of ancient Rome where a blasphemous sect twisted the message of the early Christians--to modern America with its obsession with violence, deities and saints and the reincarnations of beasts battle over sublime and profane, where the very reasons for existence for us all may lie in the unthinkable.Edward Lee (author of CITY INFERNAL, MONSTROSITY, INCUBI, and SUCCUBI) says in his introduction to this new novel-length version, "What's most unique of all here (and jealously fascinating) are the creative guts of the author. If there's an ultimate dichotomy in the horror genre, it's got to be Jacob...armed with a talent to write the most beautiful prose yet using that talent to examine the most unspeakable and detestable horror. ...It's one of my all time favorite novels in the field."

The Novel

Dread in the Beast

Zugzug

Bryan Alexander

I approached Dread in the Beast as part of my quest to find the best 21st-century horror novel. Charlee Jacobs' novel won both awards and attention, and its reputation attracted me.

I haven't read anything else by Jacobs, including the novella I believe this novel is based upon.

Oh, I wanted to like this more than I did.

How to describe Dread in the Beast... it's a visionary horror novel, a very ambitious epic about the rediscovery and reemergence of a forgotten and forbidden deity. To get there Jacobs runs several plot lines: an archaeologist pursuing an obsession that sometimes costs him; a young woman afraid of losing her mind as her identity unspools after a cruel sexual encounter; an enthusiastic serial killer, warped by a deranged childhood, aiming for transcendence amid gore and philosophy.

But don't let that description give the wrong impression. Dread in the Beast isn't driven very far by plotting. It's playing in a world different from that of the thriller or potboiler horror tale, a visionary and taboo-focused field, one sown and tilled by the likes of Octave Mirbeau and Georges Bataille with touches of Charles Fort. Jacobs uses this novel to explore obsession and the cracks in the world, letting characters and paragraphs press their boundaries.

The main taboo here is scatology. As the reader figures out very quickly, Dread is about the reemergence of an ancient goddess of human waste. Characters obsess over feces, eroticize shit, get victimized by crap, and die in the stuff. I can't think of a text that has this laser-like obsession with the human bowels' productions, except perhaps Sade's 120 Days of Sodom or the great sewer races of the Dunciad. But while Sade wants to demystify the world, tearing down religion and custom to reveal the material brutes we actually are, Jacob wants to build up a new order that offers its own transcendence. 

I admire that ambition, which certainly makes Dread out in the current horror field. It splatters, yes, but not like splatter punks do (or did; are they still around?). Jacobs happily jettisons daily life for visions and obscurity. I also admire the novel's style, as paragraphs wander into philosophy and mysticism, then back into toilets and suffering, confused people. Another car rolled up next to hers, the bass in their music so loud she actually felt it dissolving marrow in her bones. Its windows were down - as were hers since the funky air conditioning had expired. It was August and steamy hot. So hot the pollution at night seemed to mate with itself to spawn shadowy dinosaurs of poison, which stalked the roadways and climbed the skyscrapers and fought in the widest alleys.
There were four young men in this car... (197) Dread's language also turns on itself, winking:Sheol's Ditch was made up of bricked crevasses and gulches or crumbling brownstone/brimstone. The alley running between the buildings on this side of the block... was what some might have called a "defile". A word which also means to corrupt. That was a passageway between mountains. And her he was in his part of the mountain on the left, Jason Cave, a hollow little boy being filled lately with the most frightful of enlightening and defiling esoterica, looking up from a defile to try to find a patch of emetic night sky. Damn! He loved language! (84) 

Dread invents mythologies and fantasies energetically, sometimes with powerful scenes. We get the aforementioned goddess, but also a cosmic cyborg plumber, a damned world of torment that isn't exactly hell, people turned into floating eyeballs, a murderous street gang combining death by feces with literary quotations, human bonsai, and a Vatican conspiracy. That last bit made me thing this book is like some rogue parody of Dan Brown imported from an insane parallel dimension.

And yet. It doesn't work too well as a novel. Perhaps because it's an expansion from a shorter form, it suffers from repetition. Some interesting ideas and plot threads appear then vanish, and it doesn't seem to be an effect of decadence or experimentation. Several directions just falter, like the serial killer's philosophical explorations, which must surely be parodic, right?

It is certainly horror. Dread is filled with gore, torture, rape, dismemberment, cannibalism, and killings of all kinds, with side orders of depravity, blasphemy, and bitter human defeat. There's no point attached content or trigger warnings to this book. However, Dread doesn't actually embody the titular dread. It's too cheerful for that, weirdly. It even ends on a note of redemption, somehow.

Despite a lifetime of reading horror and depraved stuff, I found myself tiring by the last third of Dread in the Beast. Repetition was getting to me. I wasn't sure that the plots were actually getting anywhere. But after I finished it, rereading gave me new respect for Jacobs' inspired, mad, taboo-flushing project. 

Definitely not for everyone. This is a book for people excited about the edge of humanity, and would have blown my mind as a teenager. It's an important volume in the history of 21st-century horror. It certainly makes me want to check out the rest of Charlee Jacobs' output... and I leave fecal jokes as exercises for the reader.

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Dread in the Beast by Charlee Jacob

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