The Beauty
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3.8 • 14 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Nominated for the Shirley Jackson and Saboteur awards, this game-changing story was chosen by Adam Nevill as one of his favourite horror short stories: “What a refreshing gust of tiny spores this novella explodes into, and I inhaled them all with glee”.
Somewhere away from the cities and towns, in the Valley of the Rocks, a society of men and boys gather around the fire each night to listen to their history recounted by Nate, the storyteller. Requested most often by the group is the tale of the death of all women.
They are the last generation.
One evening, Nate brings back new secrets from the woods; peculiar mushrooms are growing from the ground where the women’s bodies lie buried. These are the first signs of a strange and insidious presence unlike anything ever known before…
Discover the Beauty.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Whiteley's solid first book-length volume in the U.S. pairs the title story, published in 2014, with "Peace, Pipe," a new work. "The Beauty" examines self-isolated men who call their community "the Group." Their saga is told by Nathan, who continuously reimagines the shaping power of his storytelling role. After an epidemic kills off all women, strange mushrooms grow from their graves, taking on shambling female shapes. Are they medicine? Golems conjured by male mythologizing? Evolution's next stage? Nathan considers and the Group resists each possibility, with catastrophic consequences. In contrast, "Peace, Pipe" features a narrator who's so isolated that he hallucinates conversations with a pipe in his quarantine chamber. Pipe proves a sympathetic interlocutor for Alex's history as an interstellar diplomat, whose mistake has caused a socioecological cataclysm still underway on the planet Demeter. Steeped in regret, Alex snatches at an opportunity for one small redemption: the rescue of his planetside friend Thumbs. The question is how much redemption is going to cost Thumbs, his persecutors, Alex, and even Pipe. Of the two stories, "Peace, Pipe" is the more enticing, offering a greater range of emotion and whimsy. The contrasting moods make for a well-constructed dyad that questions the limits of seeing oneself in the other.
Customer Reviews
Disturbing and intoxicating
This book was one of the strangest I’ve ever read and I long for an ending to the story. It ends so abruptly that I found myself searching for more pages. Very short and worth the read.