Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob, Edward Lee (Introduction)

Dread in the The Novel used to be a novella about the goddess of waste and the king of wasters. Now it is a novel, stuffed full of the gruesome and horrible. Taken from the mythologies and histories of humankind, it follows the trail of the Mother Spririt of the worst that the world is capable of producing. From the catacombs of ancient Rome where a blasphemous sect twisted the message of the early Christians--to modern America with its obsession with violence, deities and saints and the reincarnations of beasts battle over sublime and profane, where the very reasons for existence for us all may lie in the unthinkable. Edward Lee (author of City Infernal , Monstrocity , Incubi , and Succubi ) says in his introduction to this new novel-length version, "What's most unique of all here (and jealously fascinating) are the creative guts of the author. If there's an ultimate dichotomy in the horror genre, it's got to be Jacob...armed with a talent to write the most beautiful prose yet using that talent to examine the most unspeakable and detestable horror. ...It's one of my all time favorite novels in the field."

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Female Authors, Splatterpunk

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Charlee Jacob has been a digger for dinosaur bones, a seller of designer rags, and a cook - to mention only a few things. With more than 950 publishing credits, Charlee has been writing dark poetry and prose for more than 25 years. Some of her recent publishing events include the novel STILL (Necro), the poetry collection HERESY (Necro), and the novel DARK MOODS. She is a three-time Bram Stoker Award winner, two of those awards for her novel DREAD IN THE BEAST and the poetry collection SINEATER; the third award for collaborative poetry collection, VECTORS, with Marge Simon. Permanently disabled, she has begun to paint as one of her forms of phsycial therapy. She lives in Irving, Texas with her husband Jim and a plethora of felines.

Courtesy: http://www.williamcookwriter.com

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edward Lee notes in his introduction that this is one of his all-time favorite novels and I can see why. Lee notes how unique Jacob is, blending beautiful prose with horrific scenes and I have to agree. I also applaud her vivid imaginary and the often surreal feel to the prose/story. Definitely a wordsmith to good effect! Dread in the Beast I would call 'cosmic horror', but in a way I have never seen before.

To be blunt, the book concerns the Goddess of Shit (Aralu) in her many incarnations over history. How to even begin to review this? Jacob gives us several main characters punctuated with vivid historical anecdotes of prior societies beliefs and the Goddess. For example:

The venerable Hindu spiritual leader Mohandas Karamchand Ghandi believed human waste to be as holy an object as that from any sacred cow. He used to take walks and he would pick clean the roadways. He would say, "Removing the excreta of others is a form of communion."

These little vignettes mostly come from a book, Sacred Sepsis one of the main characters (an archeologist) wrote.

Our lead, Dorian, starts the novel off as a college student (in NYC?). Some cult is terrorizing the city, deemed the 'Shit Detail', which kills people with, you guessed it, shit. On the way to school Dorian sees a victim, a shit-suffocated baby in its stroller (the stroller is briming with shit, with only a hand sticking out). After a bad sexual encounter with the campus stud, Dorian starts changing...

Another lead, Jim Singer, teaches and works as an anthropologist, and somehow keeps finding deadly shit from the past, literally. For example, a hole in a cave where several people had been buried in shit (tied up, like a sacrifice). Him and his mentor travel the world and find shit all over! Then we have Jason, young son of some hippies, who after their brutal death (where he wallowed in their corpses for a day or so, aged three), grew up under the rough care of his aunt and uncle. Vicious and unhinged, Jason becomes fascinated with philosophy, especially Nietzsche, and sees himself as becoming 'superman'. We also have a women living in the subway tunnels.

I loved the philosophical references and prose throughout. The story? I may need to think on it some more. So many vignettes of shit and the return of the Goddess. Jacob takes us to ancient Rome, several tribes globally, Dracula, ancient Turkey, Asia, basically, all over. Many of the scenes earn the 'extreme' label as well. While not exactly scary, definitely a book to make you uncomfortable and I mean that in a good way. 4 shitty stars!

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I approached Dread in the Beast as part of my quest to find the best 21st-century horror novel. Charlee Jacobs' novel won both awards and attention, and its reputation attracted me.

I haven't read anything else by Jacobs, including the novella I believe this novel is based upon.

Oh, I wanted to like this more than I did.

How to describe Dread in the Beast... it's a visionary horror novel, a very ambitious epic about the rediscovery and reemergence of a forgotten and forbidden deity. To get there Jacobs runs several plot lines: an archaeologist pursuing an obsession that sometimes costs him; a young woman afraid of losing her mind as her identity unspools after a cruel sexual encounter; an enthusiastic serial killer, warped by a deranged childhood, aiming for transcendence amid gore and philosophy.

But don't let that description give the wrong impression. Dread in the Beast isn't driven very far by plotting. It's playing in a world different from that of the thriller or potboiler horror tale, a visionary and taboo-focused field, one sown and tilled by the likes of Octave Mirbeau and Georges Bataille with touches of Charles Fort. Jacobs uses this novel to explore obsession and the cracks in the world, letting characters and paragraphs press their boundaries.

The main taboo here is scatology. As the reader figures out very quickly, Dread is about the reemergence of an ancient goddess of human waste. Characters obsess over feces, eroticize shit, get victimized by crap, and die in the stuff. I can't think of a text that has this laser-like obsession with the human bowels' productions, except perhaps Sade's 120 Days of Sodom or the great sewer races of the Dunciad. But while Sade wants to demystify the world, tearing down religion and custom to reveal the material brutes we actually are, Jacob wants to build up a new order that offers its own transcendence.

I admire that ambition, which certainly makes Dread out in the current horror field. It splatters, yes, but not like splatter punks do (or did; are they still around?). Jacobs happily jettisons daily life for visions and obscurity. I also admire the novel's style, as paragraphs wander into philosophy and mysticism, then back into toilets and suffering, confused people.

Another car rolled up next to hers, the bass in their music so loud she actually felt it dissolving marrow in her bones. Its windows were down - as were hers since the funky air conditioning had expired. It was August and steamy hot. So hot the pollution at night seemed to mate with itself to spawn shadowy dinosaurs of poison, which stalked the roadways and climbed the skyscrapers and fought in the widest alleys.
There were four young men in this car... (197)

Dread's language also turns on itself, winking:

Sheol's Ditch was made up of bricked crevasses and gulches or crumbling brownstone/brimstone. The alley running between the buildings on this side of the block... was what some might have called a "defile". A word which also means to corrupt. That was a passageway between mountains. And her he was in his part of the mountain on the left, Jason Cave, a hollow little boy being filled lately with the most frightful of enlightening and defiling esoterica, looking up from a defile to try to find a patch of emetic night sky. Damn! He loved language! (84)

Dread invents mythologies and fantasies energetically, sometimes with powerful scenes. We get the aforementioned goddess, but also a cosmic cyborg plumber, a damned world of torment that isn't exactly hell, people turned into floating eyeballs, a murderous street gang combining death by feces with literary quotations, human bonsai, and a Vatican conspiracy. That last bit made me thing this book is like some rogue parody of Dan Brown imported from an insane parallel dimension.

And yet. It doesn't work too well as a novel. Perhaps because it's an expansion from a shorter form, it suffers from repetition. Some interesting ideas and plot threads appear then vanish, and it doesn't seem to be an effect of decadence or experimentation. Several directions just falter, like the serial killer's philosophical explorations, which must surely be parodic, right?

It is certainly horror. Dread is filled with gore, torture, rape, dismemberment, cannibalism, and killings of all kinds, with side orders of depravity, blasphemy, and bitter human defeat. There's no point attached content or trigger warnings to this book. However, Dread doesn't actually embody the titular dread. It's too cheerful for that, weirdly. It even ends on a note of redemption, somehow.

Despite a lifetime of reading horror and depraved stuff, I found myself tiring by the last third of Dread in the Beast. Repetition was getting to me. I wasn't sure that the plots were actually getting anywhere. But after I finished it, rereading gave me new respect for Jacobs' inspired, mad, taboo-flushing project.

Definitely not for everyone. This is a book for people excited about the edge of humanity, and would have blown my mind as a teenager. It's an important volume in the history of 21st-century horror. It certainly makes me want to check out the rest of Charlee Jacobs' output... and I leave fecal jokes as exercises for the reader.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trigger warning: this review discusses sexual violence.

Let’s get straight to the point: Charlee Jacob has the most fucked-up imagination of any living author I’ve read. I suspected it with Haunter (2003) and This Symbiotic Fascination (1997) and my recent reading of Dread in the Beast (2005) confirmed it. Certainly no other horror author I’ve read comes close to the extremity of her work. Haunter remains the most extreme horror novel I’ve ever read, easily eclipsing Ed Lee’s notorious The Bighead (a novel which gets a shout-out in Dread in the Beast). In all three of the aforementioned novels Jacob dredges the darkest depths of her psyche and puts it to paper with audacious abandon. The horrors she conjures arise from the most vile, abject elements of human existence: sexual brutality (described in stomach-churning detail), scatological perversion (early in Dread in the Beast an infant is drowned in human excrement), night terrors (traumatic nightmares that leave one psychically scarred), body horror (the notion that out bodies are susceptible to infestations or mutations beyond out control i.e. a character in Dread in the Beast plays host to a 50-foot tapeworm), etc. The effect of Jacob’s prose is that of the Horrific Sublime: the awe and terror that we feel, that seems to lift us up out of our selves, when faced with the infinite depths of pain, fear, and misery that are intrinsic to human existence. I could tell you that Dread in the Beast introduces one character as a three year-old witnessing a particularly twisted primal scene while tripping on LSD and I wouldn’t be scratching the surface on the novel’s depravity.

Dread in the Beast is a postmodern horror novel. Haunter and This Symbiotic Fascination were both distinguished by nonlinear plotting but Dread in the Beast is even more complex. Revolving around a mysterious Goddess of Shit that reappears throughout human history, the story sprawls relentlessly through space and time, moving from the present to thousands of years in the past, from the US to South Africa to Rome to Cairo, from Aztec Mesoamerica to 15th-century Wallachia to 14th-century France, and that’s not even including the phantasmagorically fucked-up alternate dimensions/ planes of existence that the novel visits. The novel’s title is taken from Kierkegaard and the pages are full of quotes from Nietzsche, Crowley, cummings, Sartre, Sade, Rimbaud, Charles Fort, etc. Themes from Nietzsche and Fort play particularly important roles in the novel; all the quotations are also cleverly tied into the plot itself. As the novel progresses a number of central plot threads emerge and proceed to intertwine in a number of unusual ways, including dreams and reincarnations and texts-within-texts.

All of this is rendered in Jacobs one-of-a-kind prose style(s): poetic, slangy, funky, filthy, cheeky, digressive, and full of striking images: “The tops of their skulls had been sawn off and flowers grew out of the dusty gardens of their brains. Their chests were hollowed out where hearts had been removed and hummingbirds nested there.” Above all Jacob’s prose is eclectic; compare the preceding to this: “No one learned a damned thing from what they owned and kept. It was what they lost that educated them.” Now compare both of those to this: “…bent forward and pulled up her skirt. She took a deep breath and then ejected a foul black acidic sea of fecal chum. It spattered the walls and pocked them…” One more, just to give you an idea of how nasty Jacob can get: “Rondi of the custom-made forceps- tonsils, tongues, and peach-rind clitorises in his pockets, harvested from drunks and drug addicts unconscious on dung heaps.”

If Dread in the Beast is the most ambitious of the three Jacob novels I’ve read, it’s also the most uneven. Rarely have I read a novel that so frequently alternates between the transcendent and the tedious. For every stunning scene/image/description, there’s a passage of awkward exposition or stale dialogue or lame joke or clumsy prose. And where Haunter and This Symbiotic Fascination had a certain forward momentum despite their nonlinear plotting, Dread in the Beast suffers from erratic pacing that made the book drag despite the wildness of Jacob’s imagination. Honestly I think an editor should have reigned in Jacob and streamlined the text for maximum impact. Still, there’s individual chapters of this novel with more passages of powerful writing than entire books by other authors.

Almost a decade ago Jacob stopped publishing due to complications from various conditions that left her disabled; earlier this year, however, she published her first book since 2007, a collection of stories and essays entitled The Myth of Falling. We’re lucky to have new work from such a daring and unique writer.

The only novels I've read that rival this in terms of scatological obsession are Charlotte Roche's Wetlands and L.A. Ruocco's Document Zippo.

Cross-posted at my blog.

[B.J. Swann · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most beautiful book you will ever read about people being murdered with feces.

Dread in the Breast introduces readers to the many incarnations of the goddess of filth, and takes them on a mind-bending journey from the sewers of Rome to a cosmic toilet beyond mortal comprehension. Jacob’s narrative jumps back and forth in both time and space, from nightmare visions of contemporary America to Afghanistan, the Aztec empire, and medieval France. Other times, Jacob takes us to netherworlds of sublime and hallucinatory horror that rival in their strangeness and intensity the freakiest Otherworlds of any conceivable genre, whether visual or literary. All of these places are imbued with idiosyncratic details that make them feel authentic, and Jacob’s own invented mythos is woven almost seamlessly into real-world culture, history and religion, creating a dark alter-Earth that is at once alien and eerily familiar.

Dread in the Beast is in many ways a sublime effort. Jacob clearly hates writing boring sentences. Her prose is almost never simply functional; she’s always trying to blow the reader’s mind with some new linguistic novelty. Sometimes she gambles and loses, but mostly she wins, producing kaleidoscopic passages resembling some vivid and terrible acid trip transmuted into language.

Though mostly grim in tone, Dread in the Beast has some moments of pitch black humor that will probably have you laughing out loud, and there are enough gruesome vignettes on offer here to satisfy even the most jaded splatter fan. Though the book sometimes seems diffuse and meandering during its long build-up, it features an explosive and multi-layered finale that more than delivers on each and every one of its terrible promises. Fans of literary horror shall not be disappointed!

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whew. This is quite a, er, unique Existential horror novel about a goddess of shit and those who worship her. I'm just finished with it, and I will say that it's amazing how the author describes shit-eaters and mutilation and makes it seem lyrical and almost beautiful. An interesting statement about goddess-cult religion, waste, "godlessness" and the idea of what is sacred and sublime.

[Hertzan Chimera · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dread In The Beast was originally a mind-expanding 16-story collection of 'hardcore horror' that I picked up at the Necro Publications stand at Horrorfind 2002 in Baltimore, MD. Four years later and here's the novel that was a short novella in that collection.

Let me first confess that I love Charlee Jacob's writing: she is one of the truly disturbing genre writers in a torpid sea of sallow mediocrity. As Ed Lee wisely points out in his extensive introduction to this novel, "If there's an ultimate dichotomy in the horror genre, it's got to be Jacob... armed with a talent to write the most beautiful prose yet using that talent to examine the most unspeakable and detestable horror."

And he's right. I've had the privilege of collaborating on short stories with Charlee Jacob. She is adept at rendering astonishing worlds of pain and suffering. She's won World Horror Association gross-out competitions, Stoker Awards and more. Among the horror fraternity Jacob can do no wrong. But she's not yet written a decent novel.

My first encounter with Charlee Jacob, novelist, was the Leisure mass-market paperback This Symbiotic Fascination. I suspected then that maybe her over-bearing editors had been a bit brutal with her, asking her to go back through her usual torrent of poetic obscenity and callous amorality and 'calm it down' and maybe try to slow the pace for the reader who isn't used to the intensity of Jacob's psycho-erotic roller coasters; stretch it all out a bit, you know. The dread in my beast points to it being all her own work, with no middleman's interference pattern. And that's the ultimate dichotomy... how can such an amazing, visceral, imaginative writer of short stories and poetry compose such turgidly boring novels.

Usually, I can devour a decent novel in a few relaxing days but Dread In The Beast took weeks and, in all honesty, I couldn't even finish it. I finally got 240-odd pages into this 350-pager and just closed the book, savagely de-motivated, not willing to read on. In all that time I'd been looking for some sort of humanity to latch onto. Some thread of realism. Some lifeline. It's not about narrative drive getting in the way of the anecdotal, the way it does with Richard Laymon's books. It's not the charm-less cynicism of so many other tired villains of dream and fantasy pumping the horror turd onto the unwarranted shelves. It's not even the ever-so-helpful dialogue Jacob employs. It's just that there are no real characters to empathise with, to hate, to enjoy the ride with. There are no intimate depictions of life's suffering reason that populated the middle third of the original Dread In The Beast collection, traumatic visions like Drunken Devils, Sainted Wives And Fire and Anna's Thesia. These were gut-wrenching visceral victims/ torturers you were really drawn along by some hidden, mysterious, inner motivation. And that's all they needed.

You've actually gotta care about the characters in a novel - it's a long way to go without feeling any emotion whatsoever for the subject of your reading. Sure, Dread In The Beast has structure; it's weighed down with leaps back and forth through history as we study the lineage of the Queen of a shit-eating tribe. And there's many a reference to ancient tribal miscellany and trivia but it's not integrated into the narrative the way say a data-bore like Chuck Palahniuk really stacks his research high. It's more in passing that we realise Jacob's 'into all that weird stuff'.

Novelists cannot afford to forget the great rule of writing - show; don't tell. It's the difference between saying, 'Oh, Jack is real evil' and showing Jack doing something really evil. I felt like this book was reminding me all the time that scatological cults are real bad and real evil. I wanted to make my own decisions as a reader but I was bludgeoned on the head by how I should have been reading it, time and again. Every piece of writing should be a very personal experience where the reader gets out of it just what s/he needs - there should be no dictatorship or command-post agenda.

Dread In The Beast is a grim book, sure, but it doesn't successfully revel in its grimness, displaying mostly a disgusted sneer as a reaction to its own bowel content. The cover by Erik Wilson is an abominable insult to the eye - the palette is all over the place, the font is awful, the filters and layout is really scruffy looking and the big green digital spray brush used to 'make the title/ author glow spookily' just looks real amateurish and because of the full-page graphic style of the chapter headings the paper edges are all stained with these dark lines sullying what should have been pristine white pages. The cover soon started to warp away from the pages and the plastic coating was rolling back already. It's a generally scrappy horrible-looking book.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is Charlee Jacob an evil genius? I've been asking myself this question since I started reading Dread in the Beast, and after finishing it, I'm still open to the possibility.

I'm rather astounded that this book won the Bram Stoker Award (technically tied), not because it's below par, but because it is so damn brazen. It contains a premise that is immediately vulgar and taboo, and Jacob not only runs with it, she shoves it over a cliff where it tumbles into the roiling cesspit below and drowns in filth. A nice change of pace from so many novels that treat their horror with a dainty touch, like the author's afraid to get their hands dirty. I don't know if I have ever read anything so profane and debouched, and yet, the prose is dense and intelligent, each chapter packed with stylized language worth unraveling.

Of course, all of this makes it a difficult book to recommend. It's overstuffed with gore and depravity, and this will be a turnoff to many. Others might grow weary of the endless barrage of gore and mutilation and, uh, scatological subject matter. I did have to take my time reading it, as lengthy passages of torture and sexual violence could become taxing. It's not a novel that relies on suspense, either, but overall, this is a horror novel which isn't shy about being a horror novel, and I'm surprised it isn't more widely known. I wouldn't be surprised if it earns a cult following in time.

I will certainly be checking out Charlee Jacob's other novels.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not for the faint of heart. Brutal, graphic, downright gross. Recommend not eating while reading many portions.

[Jo Quenell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man, that's a lot of poop.

[Brandon Mackean · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a pretty disturbing read, and while at times it was suspenseful/exciting, I felt that it spent too much time on the gross-out/torture porn aspects. Though since that is kind of the whole point of the novel, I understand why so much time was spent on it.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a good book but I almost did not understand it although it's quite interesting

[Steve · Rating 1 out of 5]

Execrable…pun intended.

[Dimitri · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece in depravity and horror, an hallucinating trip
exquisitely written!

[Meredith Johnson · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book was just a scat fetish and you can't convince me otherwise.

EVERY page had poop and graphic violent sex

[Bryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've enjoyed a couple of other books by Charlee Jacob -- This Symbiotic Fascination and Haunter -- but I put this one down early and never picked it back up. Jacob has an interesting style -- detached, ornamental, surreal -- but it works best when attached to a solid story and characters we can believe actually exist in a world we can recognize as our own. Sometimes, though, Jacob goes off into self-contained flights of dark fancy, and I'm left behind as a reader. There isn't a character in this book I can relate to, or even believe exists as anything but a symbolic construct. Like many of her short stories, this is more of a long prose poem than a novel. There just wasn't much here for me to connect with. So I didn't.

[BeerDiablo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disgusting, savage and depraved. Multiple story lines converge and go to "shit". You'll love it.

[J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't help but feel this entire book was a setup for a punchline at the end. Bram Stoker Award my eye.....

[Valentin Mordovchenkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal, beauthiful, very intresting novel. I loved it!