"[Pity the Beast's] ambitious and innovative
narrative moves through time, space and myth in order to explore a larger
philosophical canvas beyond the immediate drama." --Fanny Blake, Daily Mail

"Ambitious, inventive." --Kirkus Review

"A category-defying novel of revenge, survival,
and transcendence . . . Raw and elemental, searing yet wry, this has much to
say on law and lawlessness, sexual politics, and humans' animal nature." --Publishers Weekly

"Promotional material has likened Pity the Beast to Cormac McCarthy and
there is a resemblance, particularly with the Judge's insane pursuit of the Kid
in Blood Meridian. But where Mr.
McCarthy is grandiose and portentous, Ms. McLean is strikingly down-to-earth.
Her characters may amuse themselves with flights of philosophizing, but mostly
they bicker, wisecrack and daydream, their behavior--crude but engaging, and
often even endearing--so grippingly at odds with their drift into savagery. It
sounds impossible but for all its horrors, there is little that is lurid about
the writing in Pity the Beast. I have
never read a book that made evil seem so natural--which is both the most
unsettling thing about this novel and its greatest accomplishment." --Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"Harrowing,
gripping, the product of a deranged mind, Robin McLean's Pity the Beast
is a brutally gorgeous fever-dream of a novel. This metaphysical
Western feels like something new." --Sabina Murray

"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 hard-scrabbled 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
"McLean doesn't shrink the world down to interpersonal conflict, but
instead opens it up to achieve a cosmic perspective that somehow feels
both dispassionate and compassionate (Chekhov's trick). This opening up
is wild, surprising, and not a little frightening. I suppose you could
call these stories dark, but in their dazzling perspective I find them
full of vitality and wonder." --The Paris Review Daily

"Mythic
in scope and vision, ingenious in form and style, Pity the Beast is a
magnificent work of art by a fearless and utterly original writer. I
read it with wonder and terror, exhilaration and admiration." --Chris
Bachelder

"Not since Faulkner have I read American prose so bristling with life and particularity." --J M Coetzee
"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 to me at the same time. 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, however, 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

"Pity is in short supply in Pity the Beast, but compassion is not: set in the kind of country in which plows break against hidden rocks and running water is a girl sprinting with a bucket, it's a revenge narrative that never loses sight of the power of empathy, a love song to all of those animals domesticated for our support, a startlingly open-minded meditation on good and evil, a how-to manual on survival in the wilderness, a primer on how to negotiate all of the blind and ruthless violence we're forced to face in a world formed by trauma, and a passionate celebration of those small comforts that can and do get us through." --Jim Shepard, author of The Book of Aron and You Think That's Bad

"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
"Robin McLean's gonna get you. She will take you out
into deep, and then deeper, water." --Noy Holland

"Robin
McLean writes scenes that feel as vibrant, terrifying, and wondrous as
your most adrenalized memories. Her country is never merely the backdrop
for human dramas but a living, breathing entity, alive with the poetry
of mules and skittering stone. Pity the Beast is a thrilling ride and
McLean's world feels so real that every cloud and creature in it casts a
shadow." --Karen Russell