Dread in the Beast: The Novel [Paperback]

Charlee Jacob (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 3, 2007

DREAD 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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." --From the introduction, Edward Lee, author of House Infernal, The House

"...you are about to experience pure liquid vertigo. I am talking visceral, florid, extreme depravity. Diving into this book is the cathartic equivalent of bungee jumping straight down a recently used outhouse. {It} will drag you face-first through the septic field and straight into the cess pool. This book is nasty. ...if you like your horror rancid and nasty with a leaning towards the Nietzschean coupled with a fine and flowing poetic edge then Dread in the Beast is for you." --Cemetery Dance

About the Author

Charlee Jacob has published some sixteen years in the horror and fantasy genres. Her publishing credits include more than 700 poems and around 240 stories. Her novels include This Symbiotic Fascination, Haunter, Vestal, and her novel Dread in the Beast won the Bram Stoker award for best novel of 2005. Now fully disabled, she has taken up painting as one of her forms of physical therapy.

Product Details

• Paperback: 286 pages
• Publisher: Necro Publications (December 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1889186759
• ISBN-13: 978-1889186757
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,330,080 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dread in the Beast--the novel, by Charlee Jacob, June 20, 2005

By 

C. (St. Joseph, Macau) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dread in the Beast: The Novel (Paperback)

What is it about bodily waste that fascinates Charlee Jacob so much? I hope I never know. But this obsession does provide some interesting reading, so who's complaining? In her latest novel, DREAD IN THE BEAST, she revisits that world she first explored in her 1998 novella of the same name, only this time, instead of the truncated version, she spills it all, going into great detail in the lives of these people we'd previous met only in passing. I'll be honest, I enjoyed the novella but I always thought it was kind of confusing. But this novel version of the same story is so much more complete and satisfying. Maybe satisfying isn't the right word; DREAD IN THE BEAST is one bleak-ass novel.

There are three threads we follow. We actually start with four, but two of those threads come together about halfway, so we'll consider it three.

In the first there's Dorien Warmer, virginal college student who's so flattered when the big man on campus asks her out, she can't resist. And when he takes her back to his apartment, she willingly gives herself to him, thinking this first one might be THE one. But when it's over and Gavin Parrish wraps up the sheet on which he'd deflowered her, stuffs it into a large Ziploc bag, writes her name on it and tosses it into the closet with the rest of his conquests, then tells Dorien to get out, she realizes how wrong she was.

Second there's Drs. Jim Singer and Louis Godard, archeologists in search of proof that in some ancient cultures, feces was a revered item and there was even a goddess assigned to it The doctors made a discovery in the 60s they thought would put them on the academic map, but instead made them the objects of ridicule in the scientific community. Some time later, though, they catch wind of another sect and, if it's true, this would prove what they'd theorized all along.

In the last thread there's Jason Cave. His parents are slaughtered one day, both high on acid, and Jason is sent to live with his aunt and uncle, two abusive old crones who keep Jason locked in his room all night. He discovers another world in a portal in his closet one night. The portal closes, but he's led next door where he meets Big Garth Listo, philosopher/samurai/artist. Garth introduces Jason to some of the old minds and Jason becomes convinced he's the reincarnation of Alister Crowley, the Beast.

At first, since these threads are told in their own chronological order, but not necessarily a linear way from one to the next (we can be in Sheol's Ditch with Jason in the 70s, then with Dorien in present day, then back to Sheol's Ditch. We've gone forward, then back, but the second Sheol's Ditch scene will be later than the previous. I was confused, too, until I was close to the end and things started coming together), we're wondering just how much sense this book is supposed to make. Before things start to coalesce, it seems as if we're just reading three long, unrelated stories that have been spliced together. At one point we're 3000 years before the birth of Christ. But if I've learned anything from reading Charlee Jacob--other than she has a fascination with feces--it's that she knows what she's doing and I should just shut up and trust her.

And even when you're confused as hell, that writing . . . Charlee Jacob is proof that some things you just can't teach. You got it, or you don't.

"She was too clean, too perfect. Jason found himself tasting thick salt, and tasting copper as he chewed the inside of his cheek. Salivating like Pavlov's dogs, trained in a sadist's cellar, drooling every time they heard a bone dislocate or a ligament snap apart."

As I said before, DREAD IN THE BEAST is a very bleak novel. There are no happy endings. Hell, there are few happy occurrences in this book at all. There's not a character in here I could see myself envying, ever, at all, for anything. Even Dr. Singer's later fame comes at some high costs I wouldn't be willing to pay. DREAD IN THE BEAST is definitely not your run of the mill horror novel. This isn't horror with the standard Hollywood horror story cliches, the dashing love interest, or the hopeful ending. DREAD IN THE BEAST has none of that nonsense.

This is a depressing, smelly, disturbing book. And that's all there is to it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars dazed, gibbering and slavering into a new hope, June 28, 2008

By 

Anton Cancre "horror geek" (Greenhills, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dread in the Beast: The Novel (Paperback)

I can't begin to say how excited I am that my favorite book ever has gotten a second printing, but I can at least tell you all why you absolutely need to have this damn book. As Ed-holy-hell-in-an-ox-cart-Lee says in his introduction, giving a tidy sumary of the plot is damn near impossible: is it the story of the newest incarnation of a timeless godess of waste? How about the rise of a deep, existential thug ripping his way through the flesh of the world in his search for greater atrocities? Or the rebirth of a cult of feces? As usual, Charlee weaves a complex web of lives and atrocities that boggles the mind and confounds easy explanation, but at the same time ties together as tightly as an impacted bowel. Nothing here is unnecessary, no word or character is wasted. The closest to simplifying this would be to call it an attack on our culture's sense of personal entitlement and egotism, our idea that all that we do not want is crap and all crap is worthless. Like all hardcore horror (I know the lady does not like the term, but it is the genre she works in), this material is designed to shock and appall and like all of Jacob's work, boy does it ever. Anyone who can make the guy who wrote that feculent mass of the grotesque The Bighead jealous has certainly found the right mass of nerve endings to tinker with (no small feat in a society as constantly wired into the horrific and disgusting as we are). But shock is not her only goal here. Writing with a sense of poetry and emotive elegance that rivals Piccirilli at his best, her prose seeps into the cracks of your being. There is a sense of awe and beauty here, but not in the way of Splatterpunk, glamorizing the gore in disertations on the glory of personal dissolution. In the light of such wonder, the horrific here becomes all the more so. You are forced to stare lidless into the abyss of our own darkest night and feel its gaze grasping back at you. This isn't a fun trip, but one that will leave you scarred, scraping at bone lining and tearing aortic junctures. Yet, what amazes me most is the sense of hope that pervades this and most of Charlee's work, the assertion that all is not lost despite the best attempts of some. Like the kid with the bighead shirt, I walked away dazed, gibbering and slavering but with a new view of the world. All this in the type of packaging and artwork that Necro publishing is famous for.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Mindnumbingly Slow Read., January 20, 2011

By 

Nigel Waspfinger - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dread in the Beast: The Novel (Paperback)

I finally got to the end of Dread in the Beast. It took me a mammoth 3 weeks.

Dread in the Beast was not at all what I was expecting. Yes, Charlee Jacob is skilled in the use of the language but ultimately, this novel bored the bejeesus out of me. The story jumps around in time between the different characters a lot, which made it difficult to maintain an interest. There probably is a good story in here. Jason Cave and Big Garth Listo were interesting characters at times but ultimately there is just not enough interesting stuff happening in between the long passages of background story.

There is some fairly disgusting imagery thrown into the mix, none worse than in the opening sequence, but these scenes are few and far between. The story just seems to be getting interesting when it ends.

A disapointment.