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The Butcher of Nazareth
For fans of Between Two Fires and Angel Down comes a breakout biblical horror novel that Kirkus Reviews lauded as "The New Testament à la Cormac McCarthy,” about a butcher plagued by violent visions of the future who sets out to kill a pre-ministry Jesus.
How does one choose between personal redemption and the salvation of the world?
The Butcher has spent decades trying to atone for his part in King Herod’s Culling, during which he was forced to slay his own son.
Plagued by visions, the Butcher sees holy wars, inquisitions, persecution, and finally a flame deluge that turns the earth to ash and glass. Determined to prevent such an apocalyptic future, he sets out to kill the one child who escaped Herod’s Jesus of Nazareth.
The journey takes a personal turn when he adopts a dead infant and begins to imagine a different the restoration of his own family. Accompanied by a monstrous one-horned goat, the Butcher murders his way from Bethlehem to Jerusalem to Nazareth, where he finds not the radiant savior of prophecy but a heavyset, honey-loving man still waiting for his Calling.
When he asks Jesus to resurrect the child, the answer will force both men to confront the terrible cost of faith, forgiveness, and redemption.
A breakout biblical heart-of-darkness tale of fathers and sons, grief, zealotry, faith, and the terrible freedom of choice, The Butcher of Nazareth is a literary horror novel about the violence people commit in the name of belief.
Listening length: 6 hours and 39 minutes
How does one choose between personal redemption and the salvation of the world?
The Butcher has spent decades trying to atone for his part in King Herod’s Culling, during which he was forced to slay his own son.
Plagued by visions, the Butcher sees holy wars, inquisitions, persecution, and finally a flame deluge that turns the earth to ash and glass. Determined to prevent such an apocalyptic future, he sets out to kill the one child who escaped Herod’s Jesus of Nazareth.
The journey takes a personal turn when he adopts a dead infant and begins to imagine a different the restoration of his own family. Accompanied by a monstrous one-horned goat, the Butcher murders his way from Bethlehem to Jerusalem to Nazareth, where he finds not the radiant savior of prophecy but a heavyset, honey-loving man still waiting for his Calling.
When he asks Jesus to resurrect the child, the answer will force both men to confront the terrible cost of faith, forgiveness, and redemption.
A breakout biblical heart-of-darkness tale of fathers and sons, grief, zealotry, faith, and the terrible freedom of choice, The Butcher of Nazareth is a literary horror novel about the violence people commit in the name of belief.
Listening length: 6 hours and 39 minutes
7 pages, Audible Audio
First published February 26, 2026
About the author
David Scott Hay
10 books162 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 285 reviews
June 20, 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 19, 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*."
September 20, 2026
A haunting and bleak meditation on duty, revenge, fervor, and devotion, this novel grips you by the throat from the first page and doesn’t let go. The style is sparse, giving a sense of open landscapes filled with regrets and broken promises. You can feel the grit of the desert sand, hear the shouting of the crowd and smell the wild stink of untamed beasts, an entirely visceral reading experience, but accomplished without thick exposition or purple prose. Following the Butcher on his unasked-for quest is an experience that lights all the senses aflame, and the harsh jagged edges to the writing capture the sentiment well.
That said, this novel isn’t unforgiving. It isn’t crass or blasphemous or cynical and mean just for the sake of it. Yes, there are eruptions of violence, and yes the subject matter may be challenging for certain faith traditions, but it is all in the service of story, not spectacle. And this is a story of pain, of desolation and loss. Religious frenzy, yes, feverish devotion in the hope for absolution. But also loss, shame, guilt, and fear. This is a story of knowing you don’t deserve redemption but hoping your deeds can still be of service. A story of accepting that sometimes it takes a monster to stop the monstrous, and conviction that is a skin you can wear, you already wear, you have stitched to you from the inside out. The reader is invited to empathize with our main character, with the Butcher, not because we delight in bloodshed but because we abhor it. He goes nameless for most of the novel, and in many ways he is a cypher for the reader, for our fears about what we can do in the face of an impossible task.
The story moves at a steady pace, an outer journey that runs parallel to an inner one. But the inner journey is not about finding oneself, about developing self-confidence. It is a journey of self-destruction, of giving oneself over to your faith and your wish that you can sacrifice yourself to make the world a better place. Our Butcher faces many subtle but clever tribulations, forcing the reader to contemplate who is the goat and who is the lamb, and what kind of person is tasked with religious visions and tribulations. There is a softness to him, one that is hidden by sharp-edged blades and jagged horns, by thorns and stingers and everything that cuts and maims, inside and out. We cannot embrace his monstrosity without seeing his humanity, his softness, his longing for redemption. Regardless of your faith tradition or lack thereof this story forces you to question ideas of destiny, of passion, and of responsibility. It refuses easy answers or categorizations, and disallows complacency in our assurances that the stories we have woven about ourselves are truth, or Truth, instead reminding us that they are but a balm, personal mythologies that soothe our hearts and justify our missteps. There are no heroes, only broken people wrestling with their mistakes as they try to live up to expectations foisted on them, either by society or by the Divine, recognizing the difference between those may be more slight than we think.
(Rounded from 4.5)
That said, this novel isn’t unforgiving. It isn’t crass or blasphemous or cynical and mean just for the sake of it. Yes, there are eruptions of violence, and yes the subject matter may be challenging for certain faith traditions, but it is all in the service of story, not spectacle. And this is a story of pain, of desolation and loss. Religious frenzy, yes, feverish devotion in the hope for absolution. But also loss, shame, guilt, and fear. This is a story of knowing you don’t deserve redemption but hoping your deeds can still be of service. A story of accepting that sometimes it takes a monster to stop the monstrous, and conviction that is a skin you can wear, you already wear, you have stitched to you from the inside out. The reader is invited to empathize with our main character, with the Butcher, not because we delight in bloodshed but because we abhor it. He goes nameless for most of the novel, and in many ways he is a cypher for the reader, for our fears about what we can do in the face of an impossible task.
The story moves at a steady pace, an outer journey that runs parallel to an inner one. But the inner journey is not about finding oneself, about developing self-confidence. It is a journey of self-destruction, of giving oneself over to your faith and your wish that you can sacrifice yourself to make the world a better place. Our Butcher faces many subtle but clever tribulations, forcing the reader to contemplate who is the goat and who is the lamb, and what kind of person is tasked with religious visions and tribulations. There is a softness to him, one that is hidden by sharp-edged blades and jagged horns, by thorns and stingers and everything that cuts and maims, inside and out. We cannot embrace his monstrosity without seeing his humanity, his softness, his longing for redemption. Regardless of your faith tradition or lack thereof this story forces you to question ideas of destiny, of passion, and of responsibility. It refuses easy answers or categorizations, and disallows complacency in our assurances that the stories we have woven about ourselves are truth, or Truth, instead reminding us that they are but a balm, personal mythologies that soothe our hearts and justify our missteps. There are no heroes, only broken people wrestling with their mistakes as they try to live up to expectations foisted on them, either by society or by the Divine, recognizing the difference between those may be more slight than we think.
(Rounded from 4.5)
September 25, 2026
0.5/5
DNF at page 240/313
Did I just read a completely different novel than everyone else?
A novel with an extremely promising and unique premise, that ended up being nothing more than an utterly repugnant and self important mess. This novel mistakes historical inaccuracy for artistic vision, mischaracterizing biblical icons in nearly every facet possible, claiming a “modern take” on ancient stories. It’s not a modern take, it’s poorly researched, and bereft of any respect for biblical mythology.
Even outside of its gross misrepresentation of Christian mythos, the novel reads like a jumped up high schooler’s edgy fan fiction, with gratuitous gore and horrid formatting masquerading as some sort of avant garde masterpiece.
After seeing some of the raving reviews for this piece, and hearing the admittedly creative premise, I was beyond excited to give this one a go. Only to be clotheslined by what feels like a completely separate novel than what the majority of reviews claim.
Even from a non-Christian perspective, I was willing to give this book the benefit of the doubt, but it gets to a point where my tolerance for bad-faith can only go so far.
Do better.
DNF at page 240/313
Did I just read a completely different novel than everyone else?
A novel with an extremely promising and unique premise, that ended up being nothing more than an utterly repugnant and self important mess. This novel mistakes historical inaccuracy for artistic vision, mischaracterizing biblical icons in nearly every facet possible, claiming a “modern take” on ancient stories. It’s not a modern take, it’s poorly researched, and bereft of any respect for biblical mythology.
Even outside of its gross misrepresentation of Christian mythos, the novel reads like a jumped up high schooler’s edgy fan fiction, with gratuitous gore and horrid formatting masquerading as some sort of avant garde masterpiece.
After seeing some of the raving reviews for this piece, and hearing the admittedly creative premise, I was beyond excited to give this one a go. Only to be clotheslined by what feels like a completely separate novel than what the majority of reviews claim.
Even from a non-Christian perspective, I was willing to give this book the benefit of the doubt, but it gets to a point where my tolerance for bad-faith can only go so far.
Do better.
August 23, 2026
This book has an intriguing premise, but it suffers from awful pacing, horrible diction (count how many times the author writes "similar but different"), inconsistent tone, poorly written female characters, and lots of filler.
You can tell the author is really thinking he's doing something with this one. Italic text with line breaks and the giant X's separating sections of text don't add anything to the story except for needless length. Either way, it's not epic nor shocking. The book overall is just too on the nose. It feels clumsily written and amateur.
I'd lean towards giving it 2 stars, but seeing the author glazing himself here with a 5 star review gives me an urge to punish his pridefulness.
You can tell the author is really thinking he's doing something with this one. Italic text with line breaks and the giant X's separating sections of text don't add anything to the story except for needless length. Either way, it's not epic nor shocking. The book overall is just too on the nose. It feels clumsily written and amateur.
I'd lean towards giving it 2 stars, but seeing the author glazing himself here with a 5 star review gives me an urge to punish his pridefulness.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Look out, bitches — this book is fire. I’m not kidding. It’s so friggen good I’m still vibrating. I devoured all 300 pages in a single day, blew off every Sunday responsibility I had, and even stayed up past my bedtime the night before going back to work after five glorious days off. And I have zero regrets.
If you’re not familiar with the biblical story of King Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents, take a minute and Google it. I’ll wait. (I had to do the same. Apparently my CCD teachers skipped that chapter.)
The short version: a paranoid king hears a prophecy about a child destined to overthrow him, so he orders the execution of every male infant two years old and under. An absolutely horrific historical event.
Enter David Scott Hay, who takes that nightmare and zooms in on one man caught in the middle of it — a grieving father, a master butcher, forced into the ranks of the Black Masks and compelled to participate in the very massacre that stole his own son. Many years later, he’s a man hollowed out by guilt and haunted by apocalyptic visions. Those visions point to a single surviving child, one who slipped through the slaughter. And now this butcher, this broken man, is tasked with finding the boy who got away… and killing him to prevent the end of the world.
What made this book so compulsively readable is how deeply Hay roots the story in this man’s torment. He’s not a villain. He’s a father trying to claw his way toward redemption through an impossible, soul‑splitting mission. The tension between duty, prophecy, grief, and the faintest flicker of hope is just... uuuugh... chef’s kiss.
This book didn’t just hook me. It dragged me by the throat. An absolute must‑read… as long as gory, alternate takes on biblical events don’t send you running for the hills. If you can handle the darkest corners of the Bible (and let’s be honest, that text gets grim), you’re going to have a blast with this one. I promise you.
If you’re not familiar with the biblical story of King Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents, take a minute and Google it. I’ll wait. (I had to do the same. Apparently my CCD teachers skipped that chapter.)
The short version: a paranoid king hears a prophecy about a child destined to overthrow him, so he orders the execution of every male infant two years old and under. An absolutely horrific historical event.
Enter David Scott Hay, who takes that nightmare and zooms in on one man caught in the middle of it — a grieving father, a master butcher, forced into the ranks of the Black Masks and compelled to participate in the very massacre that stole his own son. Many years later, he’s a man hollowed out by guilt and haunted by apocalyptic visions. Those visions point to a single surviving child, one who slipped through the slaughter. And now this butcher, this broken man, is tasked with finding the boy who got away… and killing him to prevent the end of the world.
What made this book so compulsively readable is how deeply Hay roots the story in this man’s torment. He’s not a villain. He’s a father trying to claw his way toward redemption through an impossible, soul‑splitting mission. The tension between duty, prophecy, grief, and the faintest flicker of hope is just... uuuugh... chef’s kiss.
This book didn’t just hook me. It dragged me by the throat. An absolute must‑read… as long as gory, alternate takes on biblical events don’t send you running for the hills. If you can handle the darkest corners of the Bible (and let’s be honest, that text gets grim), you’re going to have a blast with this one. I promise you.
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.
October 27, 2026
THE BEAST IS UPON ME!
this was absolutely incredible and exceeded my expectations beyond belief. i smiled, i was disgusted, i almost cried.
one of my favorite reads of the year and one of my favorite books ever. i need a sequel STAT pls!!!
also bring back executing men who cheat on their wives:)
Free Palestine!!
this was absolutely incredible and exceeded my expectations beyond belief. i smiled, i was disgusted, i almost cried.
one of my favorite reads of the year and one of my favorite books ever. i need a sequel STAT pls!!!
also bring back executing men who cheat on their wives:)
Free Palestine!!
September 25, 2026
DNF at page 249/313. I pushed through till I couldn't handle it any longer. Absolutely abysmal. Zero historical or theological research done, clunky confusing prose and a revolting false representation of Jesus. The premise was so exciting and had so much promise but delivered nothing. No horror, no character depth, plot disappoint after another, I could go on and on. I'll be returning this book ASAP.
July 18, 2026
“Fuck you, Jesus! You’re the cause of all the world’s woes! We’d be better off if you were never born!” severely lowers voice “I was just playing, Jesus, you know I love you. You would never send me to hell, would you?”
August 30, 2026
I'm not sure if I've read the same book as the vast majority of others here have based on their reviews.
Such a strong premise, and such a potent environment to build from and yet...
The physical book itself to start. Formatted with nearly a third of the bottom of each page empty and the paragraph etiquette of an X thread, this is a much shorter novel than its page count suggests.
I read it in a few hours, and set up my online return before I bothered to write this.
I don't see any of the stylized or "knife-like prose"
I don't see the connection or nod to anything Cormac McCarthy wrote.
And most glaringly, beyond a few scenes of violence, a good chunk of which was off-screen, there was nothing here to suggest it as a horror novel. (And no, gore does not make it a horror novel.)
Overall it leaves a sense of punches pulled and potential watered down. I found myself constantly waiting for more and wondering why core character traits seemed to flip abruptly for no other reason than the plot needed them to.
Such a strong premise, and such a potent environment to build from and yet...
The physical book itself to start. Formatted with nearly a third of the bottom of each page empty and the paragraph etiquette of an X thread, this is a much shorter novel than its page count suggests.
I read it in a few hours, and set up my online return before I bothered to write this.
I don't see any of the stylized or "knife-like prose"
I don't see the connection or nod to anything Cormac McCarthy wrote.
And most glaringly, beyond a few scenes of violence, a good chunk of which was off-screen, there was nothing here to suggest it as a horror novel. (And no, gore does not make it a horror novel.)
Overall it leaves a sense of punches pulled and potential watered down. I found myself constantly waiting for more and wondering why core character traits seemed to flip abruptly for no other reason than the plot needed them to.
October 12, 2026
If I am going to be very honest, I did not think I would enjoy The Butcher of Nazareth considering that I know fuck all about the Bible story (oops), but holy hell, did David Scott Hay prove me wrong. This literary historical horror is an absolute fever dream of a book, a hallucinatory nightmare that gets progressively weirder and more horrifying with every turn of the page, and I love how its emotional weight honestly cuts deeper than a butcher's knife.
Now, the premise of The Butcher of Nazareth is fairly simple, as we follow a man plagued by visions of what Christianity will become, and he decides Jesus must die before the religion's future atrocities can happen. Except nothing about this book is simple or particularly reasonable, and I was completely fascinated by how far Hay was willing to push any and all boundaries with this New Testament prequel story. He just keeps escalating the violence and madness, throwing increasingly questionable situations at you while somehow never losing sight of the humanity at the core of it all, and I loved spiralling together with Titus.
I mean, this man is absolutely one of the most uncomfortable yet deeply compelling protagonist perspectives I have read in a while, and I really appreciated that he never felt like a symbolic shell of a figure simply inserted into Jesus's story to serve a narrative purpose. He is a complex mess of a human, with all the ugly contradictions that come with being one, and I was unexpectedly moved by the exploration of fatherhood, child loss, morality, losing faith and finding it again, and the cost of rage and isolation through his eyes. It is just so heartbreaking to follow a man who is so consumed by grief that he convinces himself his suffering has given him a purpose, and the way that his narration became more and more unreliable as his sanity started to fracture had me in an absolute chokehold.
And look, I am sure I could have enjoyed The Butcher of Nazareth even more if I had been more familiar with the Bible, but I actually think it is a testament to Hay's storytelling skills that this works so well without that prior knowledge. Seeing this unexpected interpretation of Jesus as a heavy-set, honey-loving man who mostly just wants to provide for his family was such a wild surprise, and I loved how that gave the story this strange intimacy that makes everything Titus does feel even more horrifying. The contrast between this very human, almost disarmingly ordinary portrayal and the increasingly deranged circumstances surrounding him truly works wonderfully, and the level of anxiety I felt for these people's fates when the Butcher finally loses all sense of sanity and launches his attack on Nazareth was absolutely dreadful in the best way.
Hay's prose is also deeply immersive and emotive despite, or perhaps because of, how sparse it is, and I think his background in playwriting and screenwriting really shines through in the way he builds his scenes. The visuals and scenery are hellishly stark and vivid, and the atmosphere is so wonderfully suffocating that I felt like I was walking right there along Titus and his emotional support goat. I also cannot recommend the audiobook highly enough, because Brian Alan Hill captures the bleak atmosphere and escalating madness so well with his reserved yet emotive performance, and it only made the whole experience more immersive, for better or worse.
And look, I am still not entirely sure what the hell happened in the final part of The Butcher of Nazareth, despite listening to it all twice over, but I honestly think that ambiguity is part of the brilliance. I do not necessarily need every piece of this particular nightmare neatly explained to me, especially when the uncertainty fits so perfectly with Titus’s fractured perspective and the story’s increasingly blurred line between faith, madness, prophecy and reality. The emotional beats still hit, Hay absolutely nailed the epilogue, and I love that I can keep ruminating on this book for a long time to come.
I probably respect The Butcher of Nazareth more than I fully enjoyed it, but I also don't think this is really the kind of story you come to for enjoyment. It might be short, but it packs one hell of a big punch, and I love how much Hay manages to accomplish in such a relatively small space. It is weird, uncomfortable, brutal, viciously violent, mordibly funny, and ultimately so much more emotionally devastating than I expected, so I would absolutely recommend it if you are in the mood for a devilishly clever biblical horror tale with a deeply tragic human heart.
Thank you to the author for providing me with an ALC in exchange for an honest review, all opinions are my own.
Now, the premise of The Butcher of Nazareth is fairly simple, as we follow a man plagued by visions of what Christianity will become, and he decides Jesus must die before the religion's future atrocities can happen. Except nothing about this book is simple or particularly reasonable, and I was completely fascinated by how far Hay was willing to push any and all boundaries with this New Testament prequel story. He just keeps escalating the violence and madness, throwing increasingly questionable situations at you while somehow never losing sight of the humanity at the core of it all, and I loved spiralling together with Titus.
I mean, this man is absolutely one of the most uncomfortable yet deeply compelling protagonist perspectives I have read in a while, and I really appreciated that he never felt like a symbolic shell of a figure simply inserted into Jesus's story to serve a narrative purpose. He is a complex mess of a human, with all the ugly contradictions that come with being one, and I was unexpectedly moved by the exploration of fatherhood, child loss, morality, losing faith and finding it again, and the cost of rage and isolation through his eyes. It is just so heartbreaking to follow a man who is so consumed by grief that he convinces himself his suffering has given him a purpose, and the way that his narration became more and more unreliable as his sanity started to fracture had me in an absolute chokehold.
And look, I am sure I could have enjoyed The Butcher of Nazareth even more if I had been more familiar with the Bible, but I actually think it is a testament to Hay's storytelling skills that this works so well without that prior knowledge. Seeing this unexpected interpretation of Jesus as a heavy-set, honey-loving man who mostly just wants to provide for his family was such a wild surprise, and I loved how that gave the story this strange intimacy that makes everything Titus does feel even more horrifying. The contrast between this very human, almost disarmingly ordinary portrayal and the increasingly deranged circumstances surrounding him truly works wonderfully, and the level of anxiety I felt for these people's fates when the Butcher finally loses all sense of sanity and launches his attack on Nazareth was absolutely dreadful in the best way.
Hay's prose is also deeply immersive and emotive despite, or perhaps because of, how sparse it is, and I think his background in playwriting and screenwriting really shines through in the way he builds his scenes. The visuals and scenery are hellishly stark and vivid, and the atmosphere is so wonderfully suffocating that I felt like I was walking right there along Titus and his emotional support goat. I also cannot recommend the audiobook highly enough, because Brian Alan Hill captures the bleak atmosphere and escalating madness so well with his reserved yet emotive performance, and it only made the whole experience more immersive, for better or worse.
And look, I am still not entirely sure what the hell happened in the final part of The Butcher of Nazareth, despite listening to it all twice over, but I honestly think that ambiguity is part of the brilliance. I do not necessarily need every piece of this particular nightmare neatly explained to me, especially when the uncertainty fits so perfectly with Titus’s fractured perspective and the story’s increasingly blurred line between faith, madness, prophecy and reality. The emotional beats still hit, Hay absolutely nailed the epilogue, and I love that I can keep ruminating on this book for a long time to come.
I probably respect The Butcher of Nazareth more than I fully enjoyed it, but I also don't think this is really the kind of story you come to for enjoyment. It might be short, but it packs one hell of a big punch, and I love how much Hay manages to accomplish in such a relatively small space. It is weird, uncomfortable, brutal, viciously violent, mordibly funny, and ultimately so much more emotionally devastating than I expected, so I would absolutely recommend it if you are in the mood for a devilishly clever biblical horror tale with a deeply tragic human heart.
Thank you to the author for providing me with an ALC in exchange for an honest review, all opinions are my own.
March 10, 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 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.
August 12, 2026
5/5 Stars
Format: Paperback
Spoilers: No
The Butcher of Nazareth is one of the more captivating and unique books I've read in some time. Years after King Herod ordered a culling of male children under 2 in response to the possibility of a competing king being born, one of the men involved is called by god to track down the one child who escaped the culling - Jesus of Nazareth.
I was so impressed with the writing and the storytelling here. We follow The Butcher as he travels across Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Nazareth searching for his target, all the while dealing with the ghosts of his past life. The structure is really interesting, the whole book being three large chapters with a prologue and an epilogue., and written in a very biblical way. Even though we don't have short chapters, something about the writing had me wanting to keep going. We get great emotional depth to our characters with an incredibly unique story, and stunning imagery. As the intro suggests, Hay dares to tell a story and ask questions about a time when we get little information, filling in a unique alternate history to the world of Jesus before his adulthood.
This book also deals with some really heavy topics - child loss, grief, faith, losing faith and finding it again, and the cost of rage and isolation. It is visceral and violent, and filled with iconic imagery (we get a goat, bees, ritualistic rites and so much more), as well as a Jesus who is not at all what we are familiar with. And in all that there is also beauty, and the idea that we need people to help us through life, and that carrying rage and hate bears a significant cost.
Full disclosure, I think folks who are very strictly religious will struggle with this one, and there are some trigger warnings you should check before reading, especially surrounding children and violence. However, if you like religious horror, if you are open to exploring a well known person and time of history in a very unique way, and if you love a book that tells a good horror story while also dealing with heavy themes in an incredibly unique and artistic way, you should really give this one a try!
Format: Paperback
Spoilers: No
The Butcher of Nazareth is one of the more captivating and unique books I've read in some time. Years after King Herod ordered a culling of male children under 2 in response to the possibility of a competing king being born, one of the men involved is called by god to track down the one child who escaped the culling - Jesus of Nazareth.
I was so impressed with the writing and the storytelling here. We follow The Butcher as he travels across Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Nazareth searching for his target, all the while dealing with the ghosts of his past life. The structure is really interesting, the whole book being three large chapters with a prologue and an epilogue., and written in a very biblical way. Even though we don't have short chapters, something about the writing had me wanting to keep going. We get great emotional depth to our characters with an incredibly unique story, and stunning imagery. As the intro suggests, Hay dares to tell a story and ask questions about a time when we get little information, filling in a unique alternate history to the world of Jesus before his adulthood.
This book also deals with some really heavy topics - child loss, grief, faith, losing faith and finding it again, and the cost of rage and isolation. It is visceral and violent, and filled with iconic imagery (we get a goat, bees, ritualistic rites and so much more), as well as a Jesus who is not at all what we are familiar with. And in all that there is also beauty, and the idea that we need people to help us through life, and that carrying rage and hate bears a significant cost.
Full disclosure, I think folks who are very strictly religious will struggle with this one, and there are some trigger warnings you should check before reading, especially surrounding children and violence. However, if you like religious horror, if you are open to exploring a well known person and time of history in a very unique way, and if you love a book that tells a good horror story while also dealing with heavy themes in an incredibly unique and artistic way, you should really give this one a try!
September 26, 2026
I didn’t review this initially, but the more I stew on it, the more dissatisfied I am. When I picked this up, I wanted to feel like I did when I watched The Exorcist as a child, I wanted to cringe from the blasphemy of it all. I was let down. There is gore, but nothing outrageous. The butcher was a paper thin character, in my opinion.
Not a great start to spooky season for me. Maybe I should’ve saved this for Easter.
Not a great start to spooky season for me. Maybe I should’ve saved this for Easter.
March 26, 2026
Page turner, unique perspective, horrifying
October 21, 2026
The Butcher of Nazareth: A Stillbirth Carved In The Firmament
DNF the book at page 253. Drink everytime you read he touches his blade, I banished the name from my mind, so I can't remember what that knife is called. If you play the drinking game, you will die by alcohol poisoning. It is very bland, I instantly guessed the role of the goat in the book. Conversations are oneliners most of the time, pronouns are a foreign concept in this novel. The only thing I like about this book is the cover.
I was sold a lie, this is not a novel a la Cormac McCarthy, it is an insult to the man and gives an unfair impression that we get of David Scott Hay. That being said, I mention here giving Hay a chance, he had 200 pages and only the stoning scene had some good prose. I can only give the minimum score for this book because it compromises 2 things that I value highly in my lit: Setting high expectations and blatantly not delivering, ergo comparing someone with McCarthy and absolutely NOT being in the same vain as his works at ALL. Secondly the lay-out of this book is horrendous, the pacing and structure are all over the place. The author gave himself 5 stars on Goodreads which also doesn't raise a good impression with me. I will not be monitoring any further releases from something endorsed by Kirkus nor written by Hay>
**"Modern, evangelical Cormac McCarthy."**
I have read McCarthy's most celebrated works, and after merely 40–50 pages, I was usually locked in. McCarthy had a way with words, a prose style that, to me, remains remarkably unique. The man possessed the extraordinary talent of pouring philosophy, existentialism, and thought-provoking ideas directly into your mind whilst telling stories about horrific worlds that seemed all too familiar, yet alien enough to make you question the very nature of human existence.
However...
I am beginning to wonder whether that Kirkus quote is merely a marketing buzzword, designed to lure unsuspecting readers like flies towards the ointment.
Because this novel does not read like McCarthy. It is nowhere near the prose of McCarthy.
Hay's sentences are short, simple, repetitive, and sometimes seemingly stitched together without much rhythm or purpose. There is little philosophical abstraction, save for the occasional archaic or apocryphal expression, interspersed with historical customs and references to weapons.
Now, I am not saying Hay is a bad writer. The jury is still out on that. I am, however, still waiting for this supposedly horrific, terrifying novel to actually become horrifying.
I will say that the stoning scene was particularly well written. It was evocative, and Hay's short, staccato sentences seemed to imitate the very stones being cast. Each sentence struck, stopped, and made way for the next. Here, his minimalist approach served the violence rather than merely describing it.
But unlike McCarthy, whose prose could transform an act of violence into something almost metaphysical, Hay's sentences tend to remain short, simple, descriptive, and confined to the immediate moment. They do not drag you beyond the violence and into an uncaring macrocosm where human suffering becomes almost insignificant against the sheer indifference of existence.
At least, not yet.
Maybe Hay is saving the best for last.
And this brings me to what is perhaps my greatest grievance with this novel so far, although, ironically, it is not entirely a grievance with the novel itself.
**My quarrel is with Kirkus, not necessarily with Scott Hay.**
I would probably never have bought this book had it not been for that comparison with Cormac McCarthy. That single sentence was not some insignificant embellishment on the cover. It was the very reason I became interested in the novel in the first place.
When you invoke a writer of McCarthy's calibre to promote another author's work, you are doing more than merely suggesting a vague literary resemblance. You are creating expectations, particularly among readers who are intimately familiar with the author's work.
You are promising something. And when that promise remains unfulfilled, the resulting disappointment should not automatically be laid at the feet of the writer whose book you have just sold. This is where I believe Kirkus does a disservice to both authors. Hay is not Cormac McCarthy, nor should he have to be. He has his own voice, his own stylistic preferences, and presumably his own literary ambitions. Yet here I am, measuring his work against that of another author because somebody decided that attaching McCarthy's name to the cover would be an effective way of selling the novel. And it worked. I bought it.
But in doing so, that comparison has also contaminated my reading experience. Instead of discovering Scott Hay on his own terms, I entered his novel expecting a particular kind of prose, atmosphere, and philosophical depth. That is unfair to Hay, and I recognise that. Yet I refuse to pretend that the comparison is irrelevant simply because it has proven inconvenient. If a publisher or reviewer invokes McCarthy to sell me a novel, then I believe I am perfectly entitled to examine that claim critically. If I really pushed myself, I could perhaps describe Hay as McCarthy-like, but only because his novel contains moments of extreme violence, because many of his characters remain unnamed, and because the Butcher himself occasionally resembles a sort of Judge Holden light. But these are superficial similarities. Violence alone does not make a writer McCarthy-esque. Neither does withholding a character's name or creating an enigmatic, murderous antagonist. What made McCarthy extraordinary was not simply the horror he depicted, but the language through which that horror acquired its philosophical and existential weight.
To reduce his literary identity to violence, nameless characters, and disturbing imagery is to misunderstand much of what made his work so remarkable. And to burden Hay with that comparison risks obscuring whatever he might have achieved on his own terms.
I have therefore made a conscious effort to abandon the expectations Kirkus planted in my head. Unfortunately, even without the McCarthy comparison, I still find Hay's prose rather uneven. His writing is sometimes effective, sometimes repetitive, and occasionally quite bland. The dinner scene in the Midwife chapter, for instance, felt particularly uninspired.
It is not the Butcher's past that interests me particularly, nor am I terribly invested in his mission. I also have a fairly good idea of what that goat is doing in the story.
But I do love the Butcher's mannerisms. There is something deeply unsettling about the way he conducts himself, something that suggests a considerably more disturbing character than Hay has so far allowed us to explore. And perhaps that is where my frustration truly lies.
I wish Hay would carve deeper into this man's psyche, or at least lend his inscrutability a greater sense of weight and menace. I want to be buried beneath labyrinthine sentences that drag me through his child-slaughtering nightmares, until I can almost smell the blood and feel the suffocating atmosphere of the world he inhabits.
I do not necessarily need the Butcher to be explained to me. In fact, explaining him too thoroughly might diminish the very horror he represents.
What little I have read of Chapter Two has already renewed my interest, so I am not prepared to condemn Hay or his novel just yet.
I will update this review as I peel through the remaining pages.
Who knows what horrors lurk at the end of the tunnel?
Since optimism is not a pigment suitable to my palette I will also add that if this book is found lacking, I will not necessarily put the blame on the author, it might simply be the false bill of goods sold to me by Kirkus. I was told this was McCarthy-esque and yet it doesn't rear it's head in the prose so far... I will avoid the publisher if this was novel was sold to what I call a false promise.
''Everything that exists without my knowledge, exists without my consent.''
DNF the book at page 253. Drink everytime you read he touches his blade, I banished the name from my mind, so I can't remember what that knife is called. If you play the drinking game, you will die by alcohol poisoning. It is very bland, I instantly guessed the role of the goat in the book. Conversations are oneliners most of the time, pronouns are a foreign concept in this novel. The only thing I like about this book is the cover.
I was sold a lie, this is not a novel a la Cormac McCarthy, it is an insult to the man and gives an unfair impression that we get of David Scott Hay. That being said, I mention here giving Hay a chance, he had 200 pages and only the stoning scene had some good prose. I can only give the minimum score for this book because it compromises 2 things that I value highly in my lit: Setting high expectations and blatantly not delivering, ergo comparing someone with McCarthy and absolutely NOT being in the same vain as his works at ALL. Secondly the lay-out of this book is horrendous, the pacing and structure are all over the place. The author gave himself 5 stars on Goodreads which also doesn't raise a good impression with me. I will not be monitoring any further releases from something endorsed by Kirkus nor written by Hay>
**"Modern, evangelical Cormac McCarthy."**
I have read McCarthy's most celebrated works, and after merely 40–50 pages, I was usually locked in. McCarthy had a way with words, a prose style that, to me, remains remarkably unique. The man possessed the extraordinary talent of pouring philosophy, existentialism, and thought-provoking ideas directly into your mind whilst telling stories about horrific worlds that seemed all too familiar, yet alien enough to make you question the very nature of human existence.
However...
I am beginning to wonder whether that Kirkus quote is merely a marketing buzzword, designed to lure unsuspecting readers like flies towards the ointment.
Because this novel does not read like McCarthy. It is nowhere near the prose of McCarthy.
Hay's sentences are short, simple, repetitive, and sometimes seemingly stitched together without much rhythm or purpose. There is little philosophical abstraction, save for the occasional archaic or apocryphal expression, interspersed with historical customs and references to weapons.
Now, I am not saying Hay is a bad writer. The jury is still out on that. I am, however, still waiting for this supposedly horrific, terrifying novel to actually become horrifying.
I will say that the stoning scene was particularly well written. It was evocative, and Hay's short, staccato sentences seemed to imitate the very stones being cast. Each sentence struck, stopped, and made way for the next. Here, his minimalist approach served the violence rather than merely describing it.
But unlike McCarthy, whose prose could transform an act of violence into something almost metaphysical, Hay's sentences tend to remain short, simple, descriptive, and confined to the immediate moment. They do not drag you beyond the violence and into an uncaring macrocosm where human suffering becomes almost insignificant against the sheer indifference of existence.
At least, not yet.
Maybe Hay is saving the best for last.
And this brings me to what is perhaps my greatest grievance with this novel so far, although, ironically, it is not entirely a grievance with the novel itself.
**My quarrel is with Kirkus, not necessarily with Scott Hay.**
I would probably never have bought this book had it not been for that comparison with Cormac McCarthy. That single sentence was not some insignificant embellishment on the cover. It was the very reason I became interested in the novel in the first place.
When you invoke a writer of McCarthy's calibre to promote another author's work, you are doing more than merely suggesting a vague literary resemblance. You are creating expectations, particularly among readers who are intimately familiar with the author's work.
You are promising something. And when that promise remains unfulfilled, the resulting disappointment should not automatically be laid at the feet of the writer whose book you have just sold. This is where I believe Kirkus does a disservice to both authors. Hay is not Cormac McCarthy, nor should he have to be. He has his own voice, his own stylistic preferences, and presumably his own literary ambitions. Yet here I am, measuring his work against that of another author because somebody decided that attaching McCarthy's name to the cover would be an effective way of selling the novel. And it worked. I bought it.
But in doing so, that comparison has also contaminated my reading experience. Instead of discovering Scott Hay on his own terms, I entered his novel expecting a particular kind of prose, atmosphere, and philosophical depth. That is unfair to Hay, and I recognise that. Yet I refuse to pretend that the comparison is irrelevant simply because it has proven inconvenient. If a publisher or reviewer invokes McCarthy to sell me a novel, then I believe I am perfectly entitled to examine that claim critically. If I really pushed myself, I could perhaps describe Hay as McCarthy-like, but only because his novel contains moments of extreme violence, because many of his characters remain unnamed, and because the Butcher himself occasionally resembles a sort of Judge Holden light. But these are superficial similarities. Violence alone does not make a writer McCarthy-esque. Neither does withholding a character's name or creating an enigmatic, murderous antagonist. What made McCarthy extraordinary was not simply the horror he depicted, but the language through which that horror acquired its philosophical and existential weight.
To reduce his literary identity to violence, nameless characters, and disturbing imagery is to misunderstand much of what made his work so remarkable. And to burden Hay with that comparison risks obscuring whatever he might have achieved on his own terms.
I have therefore made a conscious effort to abandon the expectations Kirkus planted in my head. Unfortunately, even without the McCarthy comparison, I still find Hay's prose rather uneven. His writing is sometimes effective, sometimes repetitive, and occasionally quite bland. The dinner scene in the Midwife chapter, for instance, felt particularly uninspired.
It is not the Butcher's past that interests me particularly, nor am I terribly invested in his mission. I also have a fairly good idea of what that goat is doing in the story.
But I do love the Butcher's mannerisms. There is something deeply unsettling about the way he conducts himself, something that suggests a considerably more disturbing character than Hay has so far allowed us to explore. And perhaps that is where my frustration truly lies.
I wish Hay would carve deeper into this man's psyche, or at least lend his inscrutability a greater sense of weight and menace. I want to be buried beneath labyrinthine sentences that drag me through his child-slaughtering nightmares, until I can almost smell the blood and feel the suffocating atmosphere of the world he inhabits.
I do not necessarily need the Butcher to be explained to me. In fact, explaining him too thoroughly might diminish the very horror he represents.
What little I have read of Chapter Two has already renewed my interest, so I am not prepared to condemn Hay or his novel just yet.
I will update this review as I peel through the remaining pages.
Who knows what horrors lurk at the end of the tunnel?
Since optimism is not a pigment suitable to my palette I will also add that if this book is found lacking, I will not necessarily put the blame on the author, it might simply be the false bill of goods sold to me by Kirkus. I was told this was McCarthy-esque and yet it doesn't rear it's head in the prose so far... I will avoid the publisher if this was novel was sold to what I call a false promise.
''Everything that exists without my knowledge, exists without my consent.''
November 3, 2025
Brutal, thrilling, and deeply thoughtful.
October 19, 2026
I think this was written for me specifically. So captivating and dark and yet tender. Blasted through in two sittings.
October 7, 2026
I'm happy to say that The Butcher of Nazareth gruesomely delivers on its electric premise.
The story follows one of the killers who participated in the biblical Slaughter of Innocents. (For those of you who didn't attend Sunday school, that was when King Herod ordered the killing of all baby boys around Bethlehem to snuff out his newborn rival). After decades of exile, the killer has returned to finish the job, intent on murdering an adult Jesus.
Bloody, brooding and so, so surprising. Highly recommended!
The story follows one of the killers who participated in the biblical Slaughter of Innocents. (For those of you who didn't attend Sunday school, that was when King Herod ordered the killing of all baby boys around Bethlehem to snuff out his newborn rival). After decades of exile, the killer has returned to finish the job, intent on murdering an adult Jesus.
Bloody, brooding and so, so surprising. Highly recommended!
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!
November 27, 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.
July 8, 2026
A brutal, bloody reimagining of Herod's decree that takes its impact on Palestine - and a maturing Jesus - seriously.
I'll be thinking about this one for a while.
I'll be thinking about this one for a while.
October 17, 2026
5 ⭐️ | 4.5 🔪
This was technically a re-read for me, but I did the audio (which is releasing 10/20!). Thanks to the GOAT David Scott Hay for sending me a copy. 🐐
Butcher of Nazareth is one of my favorite horror novels of the year and probably of all time. It feels like reading The Road, but written by…an apostle? The biblical prose, the bleakness, the unflinching brutality, and the sheer audacity of this story made it such a compelling reading experience.
This is a fascinating reimagining of The Massacre of Innocents, which is described in Matthew 2:16–18, where King Herod ordered the killing of boys aged two and under in Bethlehem and its surrounding area because he feared the birth of a rival king. In The Butcher of Nazareth, the event is called the Culling, and the Butcher, Titus, is forced to participate in the slaughter, including killing his own son.
I love Titus as a character, particularly the way he navigates his guilt and grief. There is nothing simple about this story, including his character arc. Watching him wrestle with the weight of his past while trying to make sense of the world around him left me breathless at times.
I also found myself reflecting on my own understanding of faith. I think there’s something fascinating about encountering a story that challenges something you’ve spent your entire life believing.
Read it!
This was technically a re-read for me, but I did the audio (which is releasing 10/20!). Thanks to the GOAT David Scott Hay for sending me a copy. 🐐
Butcher of Nazareth is one of my favorite horror novels of the year and probably of all time. It feels like reading The Road, but written by…an apostle? The biblical prose, the bleakness, the unflinching brutality, and the sheer audacity of this story made it such a compelling reading experience.
This is a fascinating reimagining of The Massacre of Innocents, which is described in Matthew 2:16–18, where King Herod ordered the killing of boys aged two and under in Bethlehem and its surrounding area because he feared the birth of a rival king. In The Butcher of Nazareth, the event is called the Culling, and the Butcher, Titus, is forced to participate in the slaughter, including killing his own son.
I love Titus as a character, particularly the way he navigates his guilt and grief. There is nothing simple about this story, including his character arc. Watching him wrestle with the weight of his past while trying to make sense of the world around him left me breathless at times.
I also found myself reflecting on my own understanding of faith. I think there’s something fascinating about encountering a story that challenges something you’ve spent your entire life believing.
Read it!
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.
July 27, 2026
Thank you to the author for my gifted copy - all opinions are my own.
The Butcher of Nazareth is a non-canonical apocalyptic novel exploring themes of salvation and destiny. This work of art is soaked in gore and suffering with a healthy dose of violence.
The Butcher, a man who has committed unfathomable acts, is plagued by visions of end times. As he sets out to hunt the man that could put an end to it all, he takes on an orphaned baby… of sorts. The child complicates The Butcher’s motives and eventually he must choose between retribution and absolution.
This bleak story, told in biblical prose, feels both familiar and diabolically inspired. Tangential to the customary New Testament stories, we meet several recognizable figures with freshened tales suited to this hellish landscape. David Scott Hays flips the origin story of Jesus of Nazareth on its head and shakes it up in a hellish concoction of grief and gore. I simply could not look away from the suffering and dread.
For someone far removed from religious text, I wasn’t hindered in the slightest by my relative ignorance on the matter. The figures and parables were recognizable enough to identify and anyway, this story stands fully on its own.
The story-telling was wildly captivating and really quite beautiful, despite the heinous acts within. There’s something to be said about an author who can turn such darkness into elegance and grace. Even the slayings felt like choreography, a careful dance with mortality.
The symbolism and atmosphere cannot be overstated. While the settings were familiar enough; Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth, the imagery gave them this eerie and portentous feeling. Historically, these are holy lands but here they feel anything but.
I think that the New Testament x Cormac McCarthy comparison is succinct and complimentary. Overall, this is a fantastic experience and I am fully locked in to anything this author puts out.
The Butcher of Nazareth is a non-canonical apocalyptic novel exploring themes of salvation and destiny. This work of art is soaked in gore and suffering with a healthy dose of violence.
The Butcher, a man who has committed unfathomable acts, is plagued by visions of end times. As he sets out to hunt the man that could put an end to it all, he takes on an orphaned baby… of sorts. The child complicates The Butcher’s motives and eventually he must choose between retribution and absolution.
This bleak story, told in biblical prose, feels both familiar and diabolically inspired. Tangential to the customary New Testament stories, we meet several recognizable figures with freshened tales suited to this hellish landscape. David Scott Hays flips the origin story of Jesus of Nazareth on its head and shakes it up in a hellish concoction of grief and gore. I simply could not look away from the suffering and dread.
For someone far removed from religious text, I wasn’t hindered in the slightest by my relative ignorance on the matter. The figures and parables were recognizable enough to identify and anyway, this story stands fully on its own.
The story-telling was wildly captivating and really quite beautiful, despite the heinous acts within. There’s something to be said about an author who can turn such darkness into elegance and grace. Even the slayings felt like choreography, a careful dance with mortality.
The symbolism and atmosphere cannot be overstated. While the settings were familiar enough; Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth, the imagery gave them this eerie and portentous feeling. Historically, these are holy lands but here they feel anything but.
I think that the New Testament x Cormac McCarthy comparison is succinct and complimentary. Overall, this is a fantastic experience and I am fully locked in to anything this author puts out.
July 27, 2026
Brutal and unflinching
The pull quote on the cover of this book says it's the "New Testament á la Cormac McCarthy" and I cannot disagree with that. This book is a re-imagined vision of that mysteriously omitted years of christ between birth and all his performed miracles later in life. But it's so much more than that.
The story follows the titular Butcher, an ambiguous and complex character with no shortage of blood on his hands. He's a man driven by loss and grief and rage. He is plagued by unholy visions of apocalyptic doom and believes he is singularly able to prevent the maelstrom he sees within his tortured mind. How he intends on doing this will come at no small cost to him and any soul that comes between him and his unholy pursuit.
Hay has an impressive way of breathing such life into this story. His writing paints a gritty portrait of these complex, and at times, broken characters that keeps you fully invested to how this oppressingly dark story unfolds. This book has deep symbolism, fantastic writing and a homocidal goat, there's not much more you can ask for.
It's great to see how much attention this book is getting because it's totally deserving of it. I'm looking forward to reading more from Hay in the future. Check this one out.
The pull quote on the cover of this book says it's the "New Testament á la Cormac McCarthy" and I cannot disagree with that. This book is a re-imagined vision of that mysteriously omitted years of christ between birth and all his performed miracles later in life. But it's so much more than that.
The story follows the titular Butcher, an ambiguous and complex character with no shortage of blood on his hands. He's a man driven by loss and grief and rage. He is plagued by unholy visions of apocalyptic doom and believes he is singularly able to prevent the maelstrom he sees within his tortured mind. How he intends on doing this will come at no small cost to him and any soul that comes between him and his unholy pursuit.
Hay has an impressive way of breathing such life into this story. His writing paints a gritty portrait of these complex, and at times, broken characters that keeps you fully invested to how this oppressingly dark story unfolds. This book has deep symbolism, fantastic writing and a homocidal goat, there's not much more you can ask for.
It's great to see how much attention this book is getting because it's totally deserving of it. I'm looking forward to reading more from Hay in the future. Check this one out.
April 25, 2026
Teresa 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
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