The Beast
Chapters (46)
Cover
THE BEAST
Alexander Starritt
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About this Book
About the Author
Table of Contents
About The Beast
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Jeremy Underwood is a long-suffering subeditor on The Daily Beast, Britain’s mightiest tabloid. Returning from holiday, he notices two burqa-clad figures lurking outside the paper’s Kensington offices. Two male terrorism suspects have recently escaped from a mosque disguised as women; suspicion and fear have made everyone alert. Jeremy’s casual observation sets off a chain of events that spins out of control, as the great Beast feels that it is the next target of terrorism.
Alexander Starritt’s darkly funny novel is a vivid anatomy of that most uncontrollable of large creatures, the British tabloid newspaper. The ferocious professionalism and manic rivalries of a newsroom have rarely been so well described. And at the heart of the newsroom is the brooding, dictatorial figure of its editor, Charles Brython, the booming voice of Middle England. His world is under threat, and he will do whatever it takes to defend it.
This is a story in which comedy teeters on the edge of horror.
Contents
Welcome Page
About The Beast
Epigraph
Tuesday
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Wednesday
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Thursday
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Acknowledgments
About Alexander Starritt
More from Apollo
About Apollo
Copyright
Epigraph
Real blood, real intestines, slither down
the likeness of a tree.
—BRIAN PATTEN
Tuesday
1
You know that feeling where everything suddenly seems more real than it did before? It struck Jeremy Underwood, a paunchy, slightly downtrodden sub-editor in his mid-forties, when he arrived back at the office from a week’s holiday and – while pausing outside to have a cigarette and adjust to the idea of re-entering the uproar within – noticed two figures hanging around the entrance, both of them draped in the lazy folds of rich black burqas.
He worked at a newspaper that in liberal London was a synonym for brazen bigotry, hypocrisy and enraged hatred of those on whose fears it fed; and that in the rest of England was bought and read every day by two million decent people. No name was emblazoned on the wall above its revolving doors. The entrance was functional, like the short gangplank and side door by which you board a huge transatlantic liner. But a pale clock face marked with Roman numerals was bracketed above it in an octagonal iron case, and the crown it wore was the paper’s name, hammered out in the heavy gothic type that adorned its masthead: The Daily Beast.