Praise for Robin McLean and
Pity the Beast

“Robin McLean sees the world like no one I’ve ever read before. In Pity the Beast, her exacting eye gives us human behavior in all of its beastliness while simultaneously reminding us that it’s not moral judgment that ugliness calls for, it’s even more careful attention. McLean insists that if we face the worst of ourselves, and if we find some way to articulate what we see, we may emerge battered but filled with a compassion we didn’t know we had, and didn’t know we needed.”

Karen Shepard

“Not since I stood in a Washington, D.C. bookstore back in 1992 to read the first few pages of All the Pretty Horses have I known so quickly and surely that I was in the hands of a writer whose skills and sensibilities soared in a direction both thrilling and foreign … But where Cormac McCarthy uses his gifts to solidify the west we have always known—men on the edge, defining and redefining freedom—Robin McLean turns the tables on him (and us) by putting a woman in charge. Though Pity the Beast is, through and through, a feminist novel, there isn’t a sentence in it that preaches, not a word that calls attention to its political undercurrents. Robin McLean may be a literary newcomer, but in years to come we might be calling her a literary master.”

Richard Wiley

“Here is a novel that sets the species down in its proper plain place: talking animal. Late Bloomer to the Big Window. Robin McLean is unafraid of the grand scale, wary of the luxury of mercy. I read Pity the Beast ravenously, stunned by its savage and glorious turns.”

Noy Holland

“Like any Western worth its salt, Pity the Beast abounds in fiction’s elementals: muck and dirt and dust; flies and fire and shit; spirits both mythical and distilled; and, of course, fucking. McLean is a writer of the hardscrabble sacred and well-perfumed profane, and her grotesques cry out from their place there on the page. Behold, the heiress to Cormac McCarthy—her pen to the old man’s throat, her prose blood-speckled and sun-splattered and all her own.”

Hal Hlavinka,
community bookstore, brooklyn

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Copyright Page

First published in 2021 by And Other Stories
Sheffield – London – New York
www.andotherstories.org

Copyright © Robin McLean, 2021

ISBN: 9781913505141
eBook ISBN: 9781913505158

Editor: Jeremy M. Davies; Copy-editor: Jane Haxby; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting, text design and eBook by Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Anna Morrison

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Contents

• One Percheron
• Two Bear
• Three Pioneers
• Four Dog
• Five Mule
• Six Tree

For Cindy, to keep a promise.
For Marsh, who stayed behind.
For Margaret, always.