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The Butcher of Nazareth
Goodreads #1 Horror Book to Read in 2026 *
Order link in Author Profile
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"The New Testament à la Cormac McCarthy." –Kirkus Reviews
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Haunting visions drive a grieving butcher to hunt down an obese, pre-ministry Jesus to prevent an age of fire and ash.
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But when the Butcher ‘adopts’ a dead newborn, his hunt for the son of Nazareth takes a personal and horrific turn.
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How does one choose between personal redemption and world-wide salvation?
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From Bethlehem to Jerusalem to Nazareth, familiar events and figures are reimagined with a modern sensibility, building to a gut-wrenching conclusion.
A heart of darkness story that explores: fathers and sons, grief, zealotry, and choice.
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ADVANCE PRAISE:
“Unique and unforgettable. A visceral and immersive work of historical horror - masterfully done.” –A.C. Wise, Out of the Drowning Deep, & Wendy, Darling
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"David Scott Hay is a street preacher for the apocalypse and he's written his own Fresh Testament, filled with grisly visions no amount of bleach will ever rinse out from your eyes." –Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
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"Enthralling, gut-wrenching, and bloody, The Butcher of Nazareth is destined to become a literary classic.” –Pedro Iniguez, Bram Stoker Award nominee and author of Fever Dreams of a Parasite
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“The Butcher of Nazareth offers a rare and uncompromising vision—an apocalyptic gospel where faith is questioned, history bleeds, and humanity must answer for what it dares to believe.” –BookLife
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“David Scott Hay has not just written a dark gospel; he has penned a devastating and brilliant meditation on the costs of faith, the weights of choice, and the terrible, beautiful paradoxes at the core of human destiny.”
–Jim McLeod, Ginger Nuts of Horror
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“Strongly imagined and relentlessly told, David Scott Hay’s THE BUTCHER OF NAZARETH stabs a dagger of horror into the murky years which preceded Jesus’ ministry.” –IndieReader 4.5/5 stars
---
“DSH’s writing is witty, smart, and precise.” –Chicago Sun-Times
---
“DSH has a taut, bristling writing style stacked with compelling ideas.” –New City Journal
Order link in Author Profile
---
"The New Testament à la Cormac McCarthy." –Kirkus Reviews
---
Haunting visions drive a grieving butcher to hunt down an obese, pre-ministry Jesus to prevent an age of fire and ash.
---
But when the Butcher ‘adopts’ a dead newborn, his hunt for the son of Nazareth takes a personal and horrific turn.
---
How does one choose between personal redemption and world-wide salvation?
---
From Bethlehem to Jerusalem to Nazareth, familiar events and figures are reimagined with a modern sensibility, building to a gut-wrenching conclusion.
A heart of darkness story that explores: fathers and sons, grief, zealotry, and choice.
---
ADVANCE PRAISE:
“Unique and unforgettable. A visceral and immersive work of historical horror - masterfully done.” –A.C. Wise, Out of the Drowning Deep, & Wendy, Darling
---
"David Scott Hay is a street preacher for the apocalypse and he's written his own Fresh Testament, filled with grisly visions no amount of bleach will ever rinse out from your eyes." –Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
---
"Enthralling, gut-wrenching, and bloody, The Butcher of Nazareth is destined to become a literary classic.” –Pedro Iniguez, Bram Stoker Award nominee and author of Fever Dreams of a Parasite
---
“The Butcher of Nazareth offers a rare and uncompromising vision—an apocalyptic gospel where faith is questioned, history bleeds, and humanity must answer for what it dares to believe.” –BookLife
---
“David Scott Hay has not just written a dark gospel; he has penned a devastating and brilliant meditation on the costs of faith, the weights of choice, and the terrible, beautiful paradoxes at the core of human destiny.”
–Jim McLeod, Ginger Nuts of Horror
---
“Strongly imagined and relentlessly told, David Scott Hay’s THE BUTCHER OF NAZARETH stabs a dagger of horror into the murky years which preceded Jesus’ ministry.” –IndieReader 4.5/5 stars
---
“DSH’s writing is witty, smart, and precise.” –Chicago Sun-Times
---
“DSH has a taut, bristling writing style stacked with compelling ideas.” –New City Journal
330 pages, Paperback
First published February 26, 2026
About the author
David Scott Hay
10 books76 followersButcher link: https://www.davidscotthay.com/
DSH is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. As a novelist, he is a 2x Kirkus Prize Nominee.
He is Managing Editor of Whiskey Tit's new horror imprint HEADLESS.
He currently lives with his wife and son and dog and a dozen typewriters in a valley between the ocean, the mountains, and the desert.
DSH is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. As a novelist, he is a 2x Kirkus Prize Nominee.
He is Managing Editor of Whiskey Tit's new horror imprint HEADLESS.
He currently lives with his wife and son and dog and a dozen typewriters in a valley between the ocean, the mountains, and the desert.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews
May 15, 2025
An incredible read. I couldn't stop devouring this book, because despite the pain, the horror, and the inevitability of the beast, I needed to finish the journey, just as the butcher did. David Scott Hay took the familiar stories surrounding Jesus of Nazareth and injected them with black-as-pitch streaks of human greed, malice, and obsession. This effectively takes the heightened, allegorical style of bible stories and turns them a deep and rusty shade of noir. Two-dimensional characters surrounding the classic manger tale become fully realized, flawed, and tortured under David's pen. The butcher himself is a complex and fundamentally human character, and it is easy to feel his pain as we watch him walk the line between the hope and dignity of man, and the cruel, heartbroken destruction of the beast he fears he may become. The best kind of villain is one that is made by circumstances, where we can see ourselves reflected back in the darkest of mirrors. In this case, Hay pulls the strings like a master puppeteer, and even when we see the calamity coming, all we can do is watch. There is no question that the butcher hears voices, but are they from the lord, or from the devil, or from somewhere else entirely? It was extremely entertaining to find out for myself. 5 stars.
December 29, 2025
My strongest work to date. No frills. No tricks. Can’t wait for everyone to read it. Pre-orders will be signed and stamped.
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April 22, 2026
An honest-to-god (if you’ll excuse the expression) masterpiece.
I think the easiest way to get started is the cover. We've all been told not to judge a book by its cover: advice that we gleefully ignore every chance we get. I took one look at the Butcher of Nazareth's cover and thought "Oh, this is going to be metal as fuck." Reading the summary only amplified that impression.
To be clear, BoN is, indeed, metal as fuck.
It is also slow-burn, modern apocrypha about grief and our desperation to correct mistakes that are impossible to take back. Our protagonist is a heartbreaking figure. He's also (at various points) warm, tender, and funny. He's a dad, and at times he's the dad that a lot of us would like to be. And at other times, he's a nightmare: a broken patriarch with so much blood on his hands it could make you sick.
Hay's handle on characters is what gives this book its real wings. Everyone here feels like meat and bone: real and tangible. This extends from our protagonist to his quarry, who, in the end, is just another man filled with fear, self-doubt, and the everyday flaws and quirks that we all have.
At various points through my reading of this book, I cried, I laughed, I gagged, and I image searched the word "sakin".
And every now and then, I did indeed mutter "Yeah -- that's metal as *fuck*."
I think the easiest way to get started is the cover. We've all been told not to judge a book by its cover: advice that we gleefully ignore every chance we get. I took one look at the Butcher of Nazareth's cover and thought "Oh, this is going to be metal as fuck." Reading the summary only amplified that impression.
To be clear, BoN is, indeed, metal as fuck.
It is also slow-burn, modern apocrypha about grief and our desperation to correct mistakes that are impossible to take back. Our protagonist is a heartbreaking figure. He's also (at various points) warm, tender, and funny. He's a dad, and at times he's the dad that a lot of us would like to be. And at other times, he's a nightmare: a broken patriarch with so much blood on his hands it could make you sick.
Hay's handle on characters is what gives this book its real wings. Everyone here feels like meat and bone: real and tangible. This extends from our protagonist to his quarry, who, in the end, is just another man filled with fear, self-doubt, and the everyday flaws and quirks that we all have.
At various points through my reading of this book, I cried, I laughed, I gagged, and I image searched the word "sakin".
And every now and then, I did indeed mutter "Yeah -- that's metal as *fuck*."
March 26, 2026
Page turner, unique perspective, horrifying
April 26, 2026
A brick through the stained glass window.
BWAF SINISTER SELECTION
BWAF Score: 7/10
TL;DR: David Scott Hay’s The Butcher of Nazareth is a blasphemous fever-vision: biblical horror as contamination event, prophecy as infection, and faith as a weaponized plague. It’s nasty-poetic, hallucinatory, and proudly indie in its refusal to behave. Darkly funny, brutally committed, and impossible to mistake for safe “elevated” horror.
The Butcher of Nazareth by David Scott Hay is an anti-hagiographic biblical nightmare that treats the Christ story like an apocalyptic contamination event. It is ugly, deliberate, and weird with intent.
This book escalates like a curse tightening its grip, and it does not give a shit if you’re comfortable. It opens with a mission statement like a cracked commandment: Titus the Butcher believes his task is “simple though arduous,” to kill one more child, except the “child” is a grown man now. From the jump, the prose is nasty-poetic and tactile, full of steaming filth, glistening innards, splintering wood, and the casual brutality of a man whose hands know how to make bodies stop. It’s also darkly funny in that scorched-earth way where humor is just the nervous system trying to stay upright while the world rots around you. Titus is not a noble assassin. He’s a grieving father, a former participant in Herod’s slaughter, a tradesman whose “calling” has turned him into an instrument. He walks through Judea with an unnaturally large one-horned goat like it’s his demonic emotional support animal, and every step drags a future behind it.
Titus, once conscripted into “the Culling” of Bethlehem’s infants, is plagued by visions of what Christianity will become, and he decides Jesus must die before the religion’s future atrocities can happen. The novel follows Titus across Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Nazareth as he hunts the pre-ministry Nazarene, accumulating bodies, confessions, and ritualized wrongness, while the line between divine instruction and delusion keeps getting thinner. The dread isn’t “is God real.” The dread is “what if faith is the vector and history is the disease.”
Visions function like infection. Titus gets these spikes of revelation, flashes of future crusades and inquisitions and flame-deluge apocalypse, and they drive him like a nail through the skull. The book doesn’t treat prophecy as mystical comfort, but as horror surveillance. Titus sees the “end” as a world burned to ash and glass, and those images are not pretty wallpaper. They’re operational justification. That constant pressure, that sense of being commanded by something that might be holy or might be madness with good branding, is what keeps the book humming. You don’t get to relax. You don’t get to step outside the fever. You are in it.
That escalation is structural, too. Book I (Bethlehem) builds the engine and immediately starts poisoning it. Titus arrives hauling a wounded youth, bargains his way into a midwife’s home, and gets pulled into a grotesque remix of nativity myth as commerce and performance. The midwife, Cassia, is one of the novel’s best inventions because she isn’t a saint or a strawman. She’s sharp, exhausted, practical, and spiritually furious. She teaches Titus sutures. She makes him butcher lamb. She talks about grief like it’s a tool. Then the book drops one of its first true “oh fuck” turns: Cassia reveals she keeps her embalmed dead infant preserved in a chest, hoping the divine king will resurrect him someday. That’s the moment the book stops being “revisionist Bible thriller” and becomes something closer to blasphemous folk-Gothic ritual object. Titus is forced to hold that tiny corpse. He is forced to ask whether he killed it. He is forced to watch maternal faith curdle into a demand. It’s intimate and obscene and absolutely not playing for tasteful prestige vibes.
This is close third that stays glued to Titus’s interior logic, with feverish interludes that read like scripture having a panic attack. Reliability is the whole game. Titus is convinced he is chosen. He is also clearly capable of monstrous rationalization. The narration has a hypnotic chant quality, returning to refrains like “The Lord will guide my hand,” until the phrase becomes both prayer and indictment. The tonal consistency is impressive. Even when the book gets grotesquely funny or theatrically biblical, it keeps the same scorched devotional pitch. It’s a sustained incantation, and that’s why it works.
The book refuses to make Titus purely symbolic. He’s ashamed, proud, tender in flashes, and then immediately capable of making someone a carcass. He forms relationships that feel like pressure systems: Cassia as mirror, the Roman legionary as unwanted intimacy and looming consequence, the Pharisee as the most terrifying kind of kinship. Later, when Titus brushes up against the Nazarene’s family, the domestic textures matter. Bread, honey, small talk, quiet resentments. That mundane friction makes the dread sharper, because it turns myth into something you can smell. It also underscores the book’s meanest idea: history isn’t made by marble statues. It’s made by people having arguments in kitchens while monsters in power take notes.
The imagery is concrete and memorable: splintering wood, mangers as props and as evidence, bodies opened and stitched, honeycomb and wax and stings, goat horn regrowth like an obscene miracle. The goat is an inspired choice because it keeps the book hovering between allegory and creature-feature menace. Sometimes it’s comic. Sometimes it’s a witness. Sometimes it feels like the book’s true demon, the thing that keeps pushing Titus into the next station of suffering. When the apiary and bees become part of the choreography, the prose tips into hallucinatory physicality, the kind that makes you itch while you’re reading.
Hay knows what to show. The violence is not coy, and it’s rarely “cool.” It’s messy, humiliating, and often framed through labor: carving, cutting, stitching, dragging, cleaning. There’s a sequence of communal punishment that plays like social infection, not justice theater, and it’s one of the moments where the book’s thesis stops being abstract and starts being bodily. Bodies do not disappear cleanly. Grief becomes an object you carry. Shame becomes a tool people use on each other. And when the book turns ritualistic, it does it with viciousness.
David Scott Hay comes out of a background that includes playwriting and screenwriting, and you can feel that stagecraft in how scenes escalate and how dialogue can turn from banter to threat without a warm-up. He’s also written satire and genre hybrids, which explains why The Butcher of Nazareth has both contempt for institutions and a willingness to go full sacrilege without blinking. This isn’t a writer discovering religion as an aesthetic. This is a writer using religious narrative as a weaponized container for horror, and doing it in a way that feels proudly indie: too bodily, too specific, too willing to offend to be sanded down into “elevated but safe.”
The book is formally and conceptually unhinged in a deliberate, indie-only way. It’s not “what if Jesus, but edgy.” It’s “what if the Christ story is the origin of a future plague, and the plague is faith plus power plus permission.” The book’s big swing is that it treats salvation as a dangerous idea, a Get Out of Hell Free abstraction that can be used to launder atrocities. It makes Titus a kind of anti-Judas, a man trying to murder the mechanism of grace before it metastasizes. That’s a daring thesis, and the book actually commits to it instead of winking.
The power comes from monolithic intensity. Sometimes the thesis-forward drive flattens certain character beats into sermon-ish momentum, and the relentless pitch can feel less like a perfectly calibrated narrative machine and more like a sustained jeremiad. I didn’t mind that. It’s part of the posture. This book wants to prophesize. It wants to accuse. It wants to crawl into your moral imagination and piss on the rug. But if you’re a reader who needs modulation and breathable pacing, you might find the incantation exhausting.
If you want a clean, filmable thriller with tasteful theological ambiguity, this will feel like a brick through a stained-glass window. But if you want indie horror that’s actually willing to be blasphemous, bodily, and prophetic, and you can tolerate (or enjoy) a book that reads like an extended, feverish denunciation, this is where it’s at. Read this motherfucker, now!
Read if you want biblical horror that treats the gospel like a biohazard and doesn’t apologize.
Skip if you want a neat, filmable thriller rather than a monolithic, hallucinatory sermon from hell.
BWAF SINISTER SELECTION
BWAF Score: 7/10
TL;DR: David Scott Hay’s The Butcher of Nazareth is a blasphemous fever-vision: biblical horror as contamination event, prophecy as infection, and faith as a weaponized plague. It’s nasty-poetic, hallucinatory, and proudly indie in its refusal to behave. Darkly funny, brutally committed, and impossible to mistake for safe “elevated” horror.
The Butcher of Nazareth by David Scott Hay is an anti-hagiographic biblical nightmare that treats the Christ story like an apocalyptic contamination event. It is ugly, deliberate, and weird with intent.
This book escalates like a curse tightening its grip, and it does not give a shit if you’re comfortable. It opens with a mission statement like a cracked commandment: Titus the Butcher believes his task is “simple though arduous,” to kill one more child, except the “child” is a grown man now. From the jump, the prose is nasty-poetic and tactile, full of steaming filth, glistening innards, splintering wood, and the casual brutality of a man whose hands know how to make bodies stop. It’s also darkly funny in that scorched-earth way where humor is just the nervous system trying to stay upright while the world rots around you. Titus is not a noble assassin. He’s a grieving father, a former participant in Herod’s slaughter, a tradesman whose “calling” has turned him into an instrument. He walks through Judea with an unnaturally large one-horned goat like it’s his demonic emotional support animal, and every step drags a future behind it.
Titus, once conscripted into “the Culling” of Bethlehem’s infants, is plagued by visions of what Christianity will become, and he decides Jesus must die before the religion’s future atrocities can happen. The novel follows Titus across Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Nazareth as he hunts the pre-ministry Nazarene, accumulating bodies, confessions, and ritualized wrongness, while the line between divine instruction and delusion keeps getting thinner. The dread isn’t “is God real.” The dread is “what if faith is the vector and history is the disease.”
Visions function like infection. Titus gets these spikes of revelation, flashes of future crusades and inquisitions and flame-deluge apocalypse, and they drive him like a nail through the skull. The book doesn’t treat prophecy as mystical comfort, but as horror surveillance. Titus sees the “end” as a world burned to ash and glass, and those images are not pretty wallpaper. They’re operational justification. That constant pressure, that sense of being commanded by something that might be holy or might be madness with good branding, is what keeps the book humming. You don’t get to relax. You don’t get to step outside the fever. You are in it.
That escalation is structural, too. Book I (Bethlehem) builds the engine and immediately starts poisoning it. Titus arrives hauling a wounded youth, bargains his way into a midwife’s home, and gets pulled into a grotesque remix of nativity myth as commerce and performance. The midwife, Cassia, is one of the novel’s best inventions because she isn’t a saint or a strawman. She’s sharp, exhausted, practical, and spiritually furious. She teaches Titus sutures. She makes him butcher lamb. She talks about grief like it’s a tool. Then the book drops one of its first true “oh fuck” turns: Cassia reveals she keeps her embalmed dead infant preserved in a chest, hoping the divine king will resurrect him someday. That’s the moment the book stops being “revisionist Bible thriller” and becomes something closer to blasphemous folk-Gothic ritual object. Titus is forced to hold that tiny corpse. He is forced to ask whether he killed it. He is forced to watch maternal faith curdle into a demand. It’s intimate and obscene and absolutely not playing for tasteful prestige vibes.
This is close third that stays glued to Titus’s interior logic, with feverish interludes that read like scripture having a panic attack. Reliability is the whole game. Titus is convinced he is chosen. He is also clearly capable of monstrous rationalization. The narration has a hypnotic chant quality, returning to refrains like “The Lord will guide my hand,” until the phrase becomes both prayer and indictment. The tonal consistency is impressive. Even when the book gets grotesquely funny or theatrically biblical, it keeps the same scorched devotional pitch. It’s a sustained incantation, and that’s why it works.
The book refuses to make Titus purely symbolic. He’s ashamed, proud, tender in flashes, and then immediately capable of making someone a carcass. He forms relationships that feel like pressure systems: Cassia as mirror, the Roman legionary as unwanted intimacy and looming consequence, the Pharisee as the most terrifying kind of kinship. Later, when Titus brushes up against the Nazarene’s family, the domestic textures matter. Bread, honey, small talk, quiet resentments. That mundane friction makes the dread sharper, because it turns myth into something you can smell. It also underscores the book’s meanest idea: history isn’t made by marble statues. It’s made by people having arguments in kitchens while monsters in power take notes.
The imagery is concrete and memorable: splintering wood, mangers as props and as evidence, bodies opened and stitched, honeycomb and wax and stings, goat horn regrowth like an obscene miracle. The goat is an inspired choice because it keeps the book hovering between allegory and creature-feature menace. Sometimes it’s comic. Sometimes it’s a witness. Sometimes it feels like the book’s true demon, the thing that keeps pushing Titus into the next station of suffering. When the apiary and bees become part of the choreography, the prose tips into hallucinatory physicality, the kind that makes you itch while you’re reading.
Hay knows what to show. The violence is not coy, and it’s rarely “cool.” It’s messy, humiliating, and often framed through labor: carving, cutting, stitching, dragging, cleaning. There’s a sequence of communal punishment that plays like social infection, not justice theater, and it’s one of the moments where the book’s thesis stops being abstract and starts being bodily. Bodies do not disappear cleanly. Grief becomes an object you carry. Shame becomes a tool people use on each other. And when the book turns ritualistic, it does it with viciousness.
David Scott Hay comes out of a background that includes playwriting and screenwriting, and you can feel that stagecraft in how scenes escalate and how dialogue can turn from banter to threat without a warm-up. He’s also written satire and genre hybrids, which explains why The Butcher of Nazareth has both contempt for institutions and a willingness to go full sacrilege without blinking. This isn’t a writer discovering religion as an aesthetic. This is a writer using religious narrative as a weaponized container for horror, and doing it in a way that feels proudly indie: too bodily, too specific, too willing to offend to be sanded down into “elevated but safe.”
The book is formally and conceptually unhinged in a deliberate, indie-only way. It’s not “what if Jesus, but edgy.” It’s “what if the Christ story is the origin of a future plague, and the plague is faith plus power plus permission.” The book’s big swing is that it treats salvation as a dangerous idea, a Get Out of Hell Free abstraction that can be used to launder atrocities. It makes Titus a kind of anti-Judas, a man trying to murder the mechanism of grace before it metastasizes. That’s a daring thesis, and the book actually commits to it instead of winking.
The power comes from monolithic intensity. Sometimes the thesis-forward drive flattens certain character beats into sermon-ish momentum, and the relentless pitch can feel less like a perfectly calibrated narrative machine and more like a sustained jeremiad. I didn’t mind that. It’s part of the posture. This book wants to prophesize. It wants to accuse. It wants to crawl into your moral imagination and piss on the rug. But if you’re a reader who needs modulation and breathable pacing, you might find the incantation exhausting.
If you want a clean, filmable thriller with tasteful theological ambiguity, this will feel like a brick through a stained-glass window. But if you want indie horror that’s actually willing to be blasphemous, bodily, and prophetic, and you can tolerate (or enjoy) a book that reads like an extended, feverish denunciation, this is where it’s at. Read this motherfucker, now!
Read if you want biblical horror that treats the gospel like a biohazard and doesn’t apologize.
Skip if you want a neat, filmable thriller rather than a monolithic, hallucinatory sermon from hell.
May 10, 2025
As soon as I heard the premise for this book (“A participant in the Biblical baby massacre when Jesus was born receives apocalyptic visions of the future and believes he’s on a mission to slay the Son of God”), I felt a powerful need to get my hands on it. I was worried I’d have to wait a while until the release, but I lucked into an ARC copy courtesy of the publisher!
Our main “hero” is [REDACTED], known only as the Butcher for a significant chunk of the novel. Being inside his mind is a frightening and somber experience. This dude has done some horrendous shit in his past, the kind of unfathomable acts no one could forgive. In his present, he’s trying to make up for his atrocities and find redemption. All he has to do is kill Jesus and prevent the birth of Christianity! Doesn’t sound too hard, right? Wrong! The journey our intrepid butcher departs on is brutal and strange. Everyone he meets on the way he views as either a temporary ally or obstacle to achieving his sinister goals. If you can believe it, he’s not the most sociable fella. He’s kinda like a Biblical Anton Chigurh! Even though the Butcher isn’t a “good guy”, I still found myself rooting for him to succeed in his history-altering quest.
The blasphemy aspects of this book are surprisingly nuanced and don’t feel edgy for the sake of shock value like other blasphemous stories. The best kinds of satire have a strong understanding of their subjects and don’t just mock them. If this is a satire, it certainly isn’t the conventional kind. The historical aspects are written in a way that feels respectful of Christian mythology. Once believers get past the disturbing idea of reading a book from the perspective of their Holy Saviour’s potential assassin, I think they would find a story that is profoundly moving under all the horror and bloodshed.
This is the second book I’ve read from David Scott Hay (NSFW was another certified banger) and he continues to impress me with his kickass prose and far out stories that defy easy genre categorization. Seems like I’ll have to try and check out whatever he cooks up next since he’s my kinda writer!
Our main “hero” is [REDACTED], known only as the Butcher for a significant chunk of the novel. Being inside his mind is a frightening and somber experience. This dude has done some horrendous shit in his past, the kind of unfathomable acts no one could forgive. In his present, he’s trying to make up for his atrocities and find redemption. All he has to do is kill Jesus and prevent the birth of Christianity! Doesn’t sound too hard, right? Wrong! The journey our intrepid butcher departs on is brutal and strange. Everyone he meets on the way he views as either a temporary ally or obstacle to achieving his sinister goals. If you can believe it, he’s not the most sociable fella. He’s kinda like a Biblical Anton Chigurh! Even though the Butcher isn’t a “good guy”, I still found myself rooting for him to succeed in his history-altering quest.
The blasphemy aspects of this book are surprisingly nuanced and don’t feel edgy for the sake of shock value like other blasphemous stories. The best kinds of satire have a strong understanding of their subjects and don’t just mock them. If this is a satire, it certainly isn’t the conventional kind. The historical aspects are written in a way that feels respectful of Christian mythology. Once believers get past the disturbing idea of reading a book from the perspective of their Holy Saviour’s potential assassin, I think they would find a story that is profoundly moving under all the horror and bloodshed.
This is the second book I’ve read from David Scott Hay (NSFW was another certified banger) and he continues to impress me with his kickass prose and far out stories that defy easy genre categorization. Seems like I’ll have to try and check out whatever he cooks up next since he’s my kinda writer!
April 5, 2026
First of all, I appreciated the personalized signed copy David Scott Hay sent out along with all the swag (the button that came with this is now adorning my horror movie shelf). A horror story in the style of Blood Meridan--an epic historical (or semi-historical in this case) journey set in a brutal and violent world. Hay really threaded the needle on human made horror vs the possibility of the supernatural in a way few do. In that way it really felt like Midsommar as well. The premise of taking the baby Hitler thought experiment and applying it to the story of Jesus was honestly, inspired. While my religious studies training occasionally went off, I can appreciate Hay's worldbuilding in the context of ancient Judea and the world the Greek gospels paint. While the formatting wasn't exactly for me, it's easy enough to look past it.
December 3, 2025
Full Review
The Butcher of Nazareth is a phenomenal novel. It’s a thought-provoking, profound story told with succinct but vivid prose. Hay’s retelling of the Gospel is dark, violent, and brings a fascinating new prospective. This is easily one of the best novels that I’ve read recently and I highly recommend it.
The Butcher of Nazareth is a phenomenal novel. It’s a thought-provoking, profound story told with succinct but vivid prose. Hay’s retelling of the Gospel is dark, violent, and brings a fascinating new prospective. This is easily one of the best novels that I’ve read recently and I highly recommend it.
April 9, 2026
Super Good
May 23, 2025
The Butcher by David Scott Hay is a wild, original ride. From the first page, the voice pulls you in—smart, sharp, and totally unexpected. It’s the kind of book that feels like it was written with total creative freedom, and that energy is contagious as a reader.
The structure is clever, the pacing keeps you hooked, and the writing has this rhythm that makes even the darkest moments feel poetic. What really stood out to me was how layered it is, there’s grit and humor, but also real depth and heart underneath it all.
I love when a book surprises me, and The Butcher definitely did. If you’re looking for something bold and different, this one’s worth the read.
The structure is clever, the pacing keeps you hooked, and the writing has this rhythm that makes even the darkest moments feel poetic. What really stood out to me was how layered it is, there’s grit and humor, but also real depth and heart underneath it all.
I love when a book surprises me, and The Butcher definitely did. If you’re looking for something bold and different, this one’s worth the read.
May 5, 2026
4.25 stars: This book didn’t have a lot of reviews when I read it, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Overall, I liked The Butcher of Nazareth quite a bit. It was a unique concept and it was executed well.
Having been raised on a biblical background, I can confirm that Hay researched this topic very thoroughly. It was fascinating to see uniquely fictionalized versions of characters I recognized from the Bible. The writing style was also beautiful and it asked readers to contemplate the topic beyond the pages in front of them.
The ending was surprisingly disappointing. I had hoped for something different. I’d love to have a conversation with Hay about why he ended the story the was he did. I fear I missed something or am blinded by personal bias.
I’d read this again and I think it would make an excellent choice for a book club values deeper conversation. I look forward to reading future works from Hay.
Having been raised on a biblical background, I can confirm that Hay researched this topic very thoroughly. It was fascinating to see uniquely fictionalized versions of characters I recognized from the Bible. The writing style was also beautiful and it asked readers to contemplate the topic beyond the pages in front of them.
The ending was surprisingly disappointing. I had hoped for something different. I’d love to have a conversation with Hay about why he ended the story the was he did. I fear I missed something or am blinded by personal bias.
I’d read this again and I think it would make an excellent choice for a book club values deeper conversation. I look forward to reading future works from Hay.
April 2, 2026
This is one wild book. It was tough to put down and generally lives up to the expectations that such a bold title and AMAZING cover art create.
The internal monologue is generally executed very well. I generally felt bad for The Butcher, someone driven to extreme actions by his fear and regret. His relationship with his visions are probably pretty true to life—“did I really see that? Is that really from God?”—but I would have liked for those to be filled in a bit more. Hay paints characters and settings well, and things get more than a little wild.
The pacing is kind of strange—the section divisions often don’t signal any sort of temporal or narrator change, so I don’t get why there are so many included. Things speed up at the end, and I would have maybe liked things to be dragged out a bit more. Still, though, this was a very satisfying read and a commentary on violence, religion, and their tragic entwinement across time.
Fourth book from AWP!
The internal monologue is generally executed very well. I generally felt bad for The Butcher, someone driven to extreme actions by his fear and regret. His relationship with his visions are probably pretty true to life—“did I really see that? Is that really from God?”—but I would have liked for those to be filled in a bit more. Hay paints characters and settings well, and things get more than a little wild.
The pacing is kind of strange—the section divisions often don’t signal any sort of temporal or narrator change, so I don’t get why there are so many included. Things speed up at the end, and I would have maybe liked things to be dragged out a bit more. Still, though, this was a very satisfying read and a commentary on violence, religion, and their tragic entwinement across time.
Fourth book from AWP!
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April 25, 2026Teresa Brock
The Butcher of Nazareth
David Scott Hay
03/04/226
Whiskey Tit
David Scott Hay’s The Butcher of Nazareth is one of those rare novels that is nearly impossible to summarize without giving too much away, yet impossible not to talk about once you’ve finished it. Using the Bible as a historical jumping-off point, Hay imagines the story of a man forever changed by one of the darkest moments in scripture—the Massacre of the Innocents ordered by King Herod. When soldiers arrive at his home demanding the death of every male child, a butcher from Bethlehem is forced into an unthinkable choice that costs him everything, including his own son. Consumed by grief, guilt, and haunting visions of the future, he sets out on a brutal journey searching for meaning, redemption, and peace. Along the way he becomes fixated on a rumor of a boy who survived the slaughter; the one who is destined to change the world.
After speaking with the author, what struck me most is that this book is not trying to challenge anyone’s faith or rewrite what readers believe. Instead, it asks us to look at the human side of a familiar story. The grief of the parents who lost children, the burden carried by those forced to carry out Herod’s decree, and even the uncertainty of a young Jesus who has yet to step into his calling. This is a challenging read in all the best ways. It is a fearless, emotionally charged, and deeply contemplative novel that should be talked about and unpacked. It blends historical imagination with theological “what if” questions. As a Christian, it pushed me to consider perspectives I had never thought about before. I truly believe this is a book that readers will be discussing for years to come—and one that deserves to be read, debated, and remembered
The Butcher of Nazareth
David Scott Hay
03/04/226
Whiskey Tit
David Scott Hay’s The Butcher of Nazareth is one of those rare novels that is nearly impossible to summarize without giving too much away, yet impossible not to talk about once you’ve finished it. Using the Bible as a historical jumping-off point, Hay imagines the story of a man forever changed by one of the darkest moments in scripture—the Massacre of the Innocents ordered by King Herod. When soldiers arrive at his home demanding the death of every male child, a butcher from Bethlehem is forced into an unthinkable choice that costs him everything, including his own son. Consumed by grief, guilt, and haunting visions of the future, he sets out on a brutal journey searching for meaning, redemption, and peace. Along the way he becomes fixated on a rumor of a boy who survived the slaughter; the one who is destined to change the world.
After speaking with the author, what struck me most is that this book is not trying to challenge anyone’s faith or rewrite what readers believe. Instead, it asks us to look at the human side of a familiar story. The grief of the parents who lost children, the burden carried by those forced to carry out Herod’s decree, and even the uncertainty of a young Jesus who has yet to step into his calling. This is a challenging read in all the best ways. It is a fearless, emotionally charged, and deeply contemplative novel that should be talked about and unpacked. It blends historical imagination with theological “what if” questions. As a Christian, it pushed me to consider perspectives I had never thought about before. I truly believe this is a book that readers will be discussing for years to come—and one that deserves to be read, debated, and remembered
April 22, 2026
A dark, violent journey into the bleeding heart of the New Testament. Written with muscular ferocity but also lit with a thread of humanity that seems to (thankfully) always wind its way into the author’s works. Not easy, but powerful and rewarding.
April 22, 2026
I absolutely loved this book. Just amazing. All the stars ***** and an instant favourite! Wow.
April 6, 2026
Wow, wow, loved this book. Loved. So dark. So good. I went into this story blind and now I see. Wow. I normally read Grim-Dark. Grabbed this book at a Brooklyn Book fair. Sat in my TBR pile for a few months. The story is heavy. I grew up religious, (not at all anymore). So I was a little familiar The back ground for this book, The massacre of the innocent. ( look it up) a story most Christians are very familiar with. And yet I never thought about it other than as a bit of dark trivia. But wow this book uses that as the background and foreground of the story. One of the honestly darkest moments in Jewish and Christian histories. A look at trauma and grand delusions. Violent. Scary. Humorous, Honest. Heart felt. I was constantly stopping and just contemplating what I had just read. I can’t recommend this more. Buy it. Read it. Buy more copies, give to your friends, give it to your enemies or even give it to your family.
Review of advance copy
David Scott Hay is one of my favorite writers for a reason...and this book... is... stunning. I finished my undergrad at a Christian college and took classes with titles like The Social World of Luke and Acts. I loved imagining that time period in an academic and spiritual sense, and it was a disturbing yet enjoyable kick to encounter the magi, the Butcher (who I had never even given one thought to before now), and Jesus in this fictional context. The magi are ominous.... the Butcher is violent, but as I tend to do, I forgive men too easily... In this case, I was horrifyingly rooting for The Butcher, for he has visions of how much destruction will come as a result of Jesus and because Titus has lost so much personally as a result of this pursuit... and he's just trying to save the world, man. I also forgave this pre-ministry Jesus for being... oblivious to his role in the world, for indulging in too much honey, and for daring to be a sexual being (we like the human arm of our trinity saviors utterly divine). The women in this novel need no forgiveness... they're strong, and they're badass, and they're righteous. The two Mary's come across like... well... Madonnas. Vividly rendered setting, complex characters, and a dramatic plot make this my favorite book I read in 2025.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Well now, children. What do we think of this? How about, still trying to gather words together that describe this story to the utmost degree of shock and awe it deserves?
Religious horror or dark fantasy is a favorite trope of mine. Or is it a genre all it's own? It definitely deserves to be in one all its own, when written this well.
The Brothers Karamzov started my fascination with religion in stories, but I enjoyed the stories that went down a darker path or a satirical take on things. The Master and The Margarita has probably been my favorite book for years now.
It's hard to find a good horror story that's an actual tale and not just written for the gore and shock value, but has it all. This one does. The prose was smart and tasteful, the story went where it needed to go, and The Butcher is a character, none that cross him, will soon forget. I'm sold on anything this author writes from this point. I just hope he stays with this trope for a bit. I'm ready for a whole rewritten biblical text by David Scott Hay.
Religious horror or dark fantasy is a favorite trope of mine. Or is it a genre all it's own? It definitely deserves to be in one all its own, when written this well.
The Brothers Karamzov started my fascination with religion in stories, but I enjoyed the stories that went down a darker path or a satirical take on things. The Master and The Margarita has probably been my favorite book for years now.
It's hard to find a good horror story that's an actual tale and not just written for the gore and shock value, but has it all. This one does. The prose was smart and tasteful, the story went where it needed to go, and The Butcher is a character, none that cross him, will soon forget. I'm sold on anything this author writes from this point. I just hope he stays with this trope for a bit. I'm ready for a whole rewritten biblical text by David Scott Hay.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 1, 2026
While I enjoyed it, it feels unfinished. Two pieces of bread but nothing in between to make it a sandwich. Really wish there was more fleshed out of the Butcher instead of all the dead air between acts. But, the last part was very good.
May 2, 2026
"The Lord will guide my hand"
If this story was done by a NYT bestseller or some author you would see at an airport bookstore it would probably drum up all kinds of controversy and hysteria. Brutal, tragic, and thrilling at the same time. The prose and pacing are stellar, so it never feels cheap or edgy with some "what if" scenarios about King Herod, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Once I started the third act I could not put this down!
Rating: 4.2 / 5
If this story was done by a NYT bestseller or some author you would see at an airport bookstore it would probably drum up all kinds of controversy and hysteria. Brutal, tragic, and thrilling at the same time. The prose and pacing are stellar, so it never feels cheap or edgy with some "what if" scenarios about King Herod, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Once I started the third act I could not put this down!
Rating: 4.2 / 5
May 4, 2026
Brutal, brilliant and compelling. I don't think I've experienced a more dangerous walkabout in a horror story. This chilling narrative of a tortured man's mission to ward off the Apocalypse sets dogma and our definitions of humanity on fire.
May 8, 2025
David Scott Hay is a master storyteller, wielding sharp prose like a knife to the throat. Enthralling, gut-wrenching, and bloody, The Butcher of Nazareth is destined to become a literary classic.
May 15, 2025
In The Butcher of Nazareth, David Scott Hay uses his distinctive prose and unique tone to play with speculative historical themes like fate, morality, and religion. Through presenting readers with a narrative that reimagines early Christian history, the novel confronts questions about zealotry, control, and belief. The story also poses profound philosophical questions about free will and the human psyche. Through its emotional exploration of father-son relationships, DSH delivers a genre-defying book that prompts social and cultural discussion and promises to be an iconic horror novel of 2026.
This was my first foray into horror novels, and I absolutely loved it! The imagery and the dialogue were so compelling and I can't wait to read more of his work.
This was my first foray into horror novels, and I absolutely loved it! The imagery and the dialogue were so compelling and I can't wait to read more of his work.
February 11, 2026
I have been avoiding reviewing my advanced copy of The Butcher of Nazareth for... over a year now? Because I know there are simply no words to convey my awe of this novel and the man who penned it.
The Butcher of Nazareth is a powerful, painful novel that takes familiar characters and fills the gaps in their stories with bloodshed. Hay has a way of writing so concisely that a single sentence feels like a punch to the gut and manages to blaspheme without coming across as edgy. Vivid and visceral, The Butcher of Nazareth is a truly unforgettable read.
The Butcher of Nazareth is a powerful, painful novel that takes familiar characters and fills the gaps in their stories with bloodshed. Hay has a way of writing so concisely that a single sentence feels like a punch to the gut and manages to blaspheme without coming across as edgy. Vivid and visceral, The Butcher of Nazareth is a truly unforgettable read.
April 28, 2026
4.5/5 stars
Wow this book was a wild ride. Grim, violent, unsettling, a moment here and there of some mirth (funny is too strong of a word). I really liked the careful walk of whether or not this book had fantasy elements or if its humans being... well, humans. I deducted .5 stars since so much dread had been built throughout the book I was itching for the story to reach its conclusion and took a bit longer than I would have liked.
If Cormac McCarthy just straight up wrote a biblical tale, this would be it.
Wow this book was a wild ride. Grim, violent, unsettling, a moment here and there of some mirth (funny is too strong of a word). I really liked the careful walk of whether or not this book had fantasy elements or if its humans being... well, humans. I deducted .5 stars since so much dread had been built throughout the book I was itching for the story to reach its conclusion and took a bit longer than I would have liked.
If Cormac McCarthy just straight up wrote a biblical tale, this would be it.
Review of advance copy
really well written book, almost like a cronenbergian version of the Bible at points. Only thing I wasn't a huge fan of is how the book is formatted. Tiny font and a ton of dead space on each page.
May 19, 2026
WARNING: SPOILERS
The Butcher. Titus. The Beast. Intentional or not, Hay embodies his own (unholy) trinity in one man, divided against himself. The protagonist, or antihero (though Titus is, in my opinion, not really either of those), is either an insane homicidal maniac suffering from paranoid delusions, or an insane homicidal maniac divining genuine prophecy.
What Hay has done with Titus is fashioned a character who we have every reason to hate—because he murdered his own infant son, because he murders an innocent midwife and her unborn baby, because he is an abandoner, a lunatic, and, at bottom, too eager to fulfill what is solely the Lord's recompense (that being vengeance)—and yet, the reader is ineluctably drawn into his journey as if we have a stake in the outcome.
If you want to understand Titus's mania, consider this: he carries a mummified baby wrapped around his stomach and imagines himself pregnant BEFORE he really goes insane.
Then, the dénouement: Titus's psyche achieves full fracture, and from that chasm emerges The Beast. What's literarily impressive about this transformation—I'm unwilling to spoil it, but body horror fans will be most enthused—is that, despite its grisliness and ghastliness, the change from well-intentioned murderer (if there is such a thing) into heedless butcher is not overwrought. Rather, it is earned, and makes sense, considering Titus's character arc.
Hay has the same penchant for disruption as R.R. Martin, in this way: You will meet a likable character and learn enough about them to look forward to seeing more of them; then, they will be horribly murdered. Which is necessary for the story to proceed. I'm just saying, don't get too comfortable. The midwife is a fantastic character. The Pharisee is a fantastic character. Several Roman legionaries prove to be eminently likable. And guess what? Yep. Every single one of them.
Jesus Christ—who is the most earnest and, I thought, agreeable character in the story (no surprise there)—the person whose death is Titus's entire mission, is one of the only ones to survive! (Or, at least survive until the part of the story we all know where he does not. But that comes much later, and in a different and older and much more popular book.)
The craziest thing is that The Beast's ruining of Christ's family is, in at least some small measure, responsible for turning Jesus into the Jesus Christ destined for martyrdom/prophecy/divinity. Which leaves you wondering if, in some way, The Butcher/Beast could only ever choose the correct path, no matter which direction he chose, no matter how wrongly (and bloodily) he cut his way through.
Ultimately, Titus is a bad guy whose story you will want to read. And Jesus is a good guy whose story you already know, and of which you will learn new and terrible things. This is that book.
Lastly, I anticipated this book being anti-Christian, and in my opinion it is most decidedly not. Quite the tightrope to walk without falling, but David Scott Hay manages it all.
The Butcher. Titus. The Beast. Intentional or not, Hay embodies his own (unholy) trinity in one man, divided against himself. The protagonist, or antihero (though Titus is, in my opinion, not really either of those), is either an insane homicidal maniac suffering from paranoid delusions, or an insane homicidal maniac divining genuine prophecy.
What Hay has done with Titus is fashioned a character who we have every reason to hate—because he murdered his own infant son, because he murders an innocent midwife and her unborn baby, because he is an abandoner, a lunatic, and, at bottom, too eager to fulfill what is solely the Lord's recompense (that being vengeance)—and yet, the reader is ineluctably drawn into his journey as if we have a stake in the outcome.
If you want to understand Titus's mania, consider this: he carries a mummified baby wrapped around his stomach and imagines himself pregnant BEFORE he really goes insane.
Then, the dénouement: Titus's psyche achieves full fracture, and from that chasm emerges The Beast. What's literarily impressive about this transformation—I'm unwilling to spoil it, but body horror fans will be most enthused—is that, despite its grisliness and ghastliness, the change from well-intentioned murderer (if there is such a thing) into heedless butcher is not overwrought. Rather, it is earned, and makes sense, considering Titus's character arc.
Hay has the same penchant for disruption as R.R. Martin, in this way: You will meet a likable character and learn enough about them to look forward to seeing more of them; then, they will be horribly murdered. Which is necessary for the story to proceed. I'm just saying, don't get too comfortable. The midwife is a fantastic character. The Pharisee is a fantastic character. Several Roman legionaries prove to be eminently likable. And guess what? Yep. Every single one of them.
Jesus Christ—who is the most earnest and, I thought, agreeable character in the story (no surprise there)—the person whose death is Titus's entire mission, is one of the only ones to survive! (Or, at least survive until the part of the story we all know where he does not. But that comes much later, and in a different and older and much more popular book.)
The craziest thing is that The Beast's ruining of Christ's family is, in at least some small measure, responsible for turning Jesus into the Jesus Christ destined for martyrdom/prophecy/divinity. Which leaves you wondering if, in some way, The Butcher/Beast could only ever choose the correct path, no matter which direction he chose, no matter how wrongly (and bloodily) he cut his way through.
Ultimately, Titus is a bad guy whose story you will want to read. And Jesus is a good guy whose story you already know, and of which you will learn new and terrible things. This is that book.
Lastly, I anticipated this book being anti-Christian, and in my opinion it is most decidedly not. Quite the tightrope to walk without falling, but David Scott Hay manages it all.
May 16, 2025
I can be a bit like Charlie Brown with the football when it comes to fictional reimaginings of the New Testament. No matter how many times I'm disappointed, it's a conceptual template I continue to seek out, hoping against hope that the next one will be the one that connects. As such, when David Scott Hay first sent me The Butcher of Nazareth, I was both excited (as a fan of both the form, and his previous work), and a little worried (as a reader already let down by the more famous likes of Philip Pullman and Christopher Moore). But fear not, brothers and sisters - followers of the good books - for I bring you glad tidings of great joy. This one is rad as hell.
Now full disclosure, I ended up writing the introduction for this book, so I'm necessarily biased, and much of what I have to say about it went into that work (which I hope you'll all read). But still, speaking strictly as a reader, The Butcher of Nazareth is a wicked good time. Revolving around Titus, a man conscripted into Herod's mass infanticide (here dubbed "the culling") and subsequently plagued by visions of the future apocalypse he believes will result from that project's failure to eliminate the Christ child, this is a dark, deft, and at times sinfully clever traipse across the shifting desert sands of myth and history in which he sets out to finish the job (with a bigass goat in tow).
In the hands of a lesser author, this whole idea might well have resulted in a one-note polemic against the church, or worse yet, a string of mindless, naughty boy sacrileges, but Hay takes great pains to imbue his characters, both real and imagined, with nuance and depth. His depiction of the young Jesus as a potbellied hippie frolicking with his beloved Mary Magdalene feels sweet and sexy in ways even Kazantzakis wouldn't dare, and in contrasting the small, lunatic horrors of Titus's damaged psyche with the rampant, global horrors still being wrought in the name of a corrupt, crusading religious movement, he offers us a vessel for all our lost and broken faiths.
These characters sense their own importance - their place at the dawn of something bigger than themselves, and The Butcher of Nazareth uses them to ask big questions - namely, would the world be better off if someone had just smothered baby Jesus in his manger? - without insisting on solid answers (as all good Biblical speculation should). And while I've still got a few more Charlie Brown kicks at the New Testament football in my reading plans for this year (Robert Graves, I'm lookin' at you), I feel confident in saying that no one will ever approach the greatest story ever told quite like David Scott Hay. At the risk of a little naughty boy sacrilege myself, I'd say he fuckin' nailed it.
Now full disclosure, I ended up writing the introduction for this book, so I'm necessarily biased, and much of what I have to say about it went into that work (which I hope you'll all read). But still, speaking strictly as a reader, The Butcher of Nazareth is a wicked good time. Revolving around Titus, a man conscripted into Herod's mass infanticide (here dubbed "the culling") and subsequently plagued by visions of the future apocalypse he believes will result from that project's failure to eliminate the Christ child, this is a dark, deft, and at times sinfully clever traipse across the shifting desert sands of myth and history in which he sets out to finish the job (with a bigass goat in tow).
In the hands of a lesser author, this whole idea might well have resulted in a one-note polemic against the church, or worse yet, a string of mindless, naughty boy sacrileges, but Hay takes great pains to imbue his characters, both real and imagined, with nuance and depth. His depiction of the young Jesus as a potbellied hippie frolicking with his beloved Mary Magdalene feels sweet and sexy in ways even Kazantzakis wouldn't dare, and in contrasting the small, lunatic horrors of Titus's damaged psyche with the rampant, global horrors still being wrought in the name of a corrupt, crusading religious movement, he offers us a vessel for all our lost and broken faiths.
These characters sense their own importance - their place at the dawn of something bigger than themselves, and The Butcher of Nazareth uses them to ask big questions - namely, would the world be better off if someone had just smothered baby Jesus in his manger? - without insisting on solid answers (as all good Biblical speculation should). And while I've still got a few more Charlie Brown kicks at the New Testament football in my reading plans for this year (Robert Graves, I'm lookin' at you), I feel confident in saying that no one will ever approach the greatest story ever told quite like David Scott Hay. At the risk of a little naughty boy sacrilege myself, I'd say he fuckin' nailed it.
April 14, 2026
4.5 stars
Lyrical and propulsive, I really enjoyed reading this strange, evocative, and occasionally disturbing novel. I appreciated that it was grounded in historical realism and not psychedelia or magic. It basically reads as literary historical fiction, with a curious, casually cruel psychopath at its center.
The primary premise — which I won't reveal — is killer (heh), but ultimately not really the artistic thrust of the novel, as least not as I read it. It is provocative, but as in thought-provoking, not in the edgelordy sense. The first epigraph is Matthew 2:16.
The design of the book, especially the front and back covers, as well as the typeface and formatting made this a pleasure to read and behold; definitely recommend reading this as a physical book. I dinged a half star for some odd prose which yanked me out of the flow* and because the ending, strange and fierce though it was, dissipated a lot of the energy that propelled me to the conclusion. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't... this. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I shall revisit the final half of the final chapter on my next read through and perhaps my opinion will change.
* like the nickname Maggie or when, at one point, a character "clocks" something, which bothers me less as an anachronism and more as a colloquialism
Lyrical and propulsive, I really enjoyed reading this strange, evocative, and occasionally disturbing novel. I appreciated that it was grounded in historical realism and not psychedelia or magic. It basically reads as literary historical fiction, with a curious, casually cruel psychopath at its center.
The primary premise — which I won't reveal — is killer (heh), but ultimately not really the artistic thrust of the novel, as least not as I read it. It is provocative, but as in thought-provoking, not in the edgelordy sense. The first epigraph is Matthew 2:16.
Then Herod, when he saw that he was deceived by the wise men, was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise menI'm familiar with the verse, and the so-called "massacre of the innocents" (herein, "The Culling," which rings nicely ominous), but until this novel, I'd never thought about the people who actually did the baby killing for Herod. "Sent forth and put to death" is oddly indirect; even the NIV's more direct "gave orders to kill all the boys" is passive. The Butcher of Nazareth concerns one of those people.
The design of the book, especially the front and back covers, as well as the typeface and formatting made this a pleasure to read and behold; definitely recommend reading this as a physical book. I dinged a half star for some odd prose which yanked me out of the flow* and because the ending, strange and fierce though it was, dissipated a lot of the energy that propelled me to the conclusion. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't... this. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I shall revisit the final half of the final chapter on my next read through and perhaps my opinion will change.
* like the nickname Maggie or when, at one point, a character "clocks" something, which bothers me less as an anachronism and more as a colloquialism
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