Beasts (Otto Penzler Books)

Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Eerie, haunting, disturbing and yet satisfying and impossible to put down, 'Beasts' was probably not the ideal read on my most recent trip to a resort in Dubai. Still, I was drawn into the story (novella) and even identified with several of the characters (the fictitious Catamount College could so easily be Vassar) and their 'artistic flairs' which allow them to be so drawn in by the creepy Professor Harrow and his wife. This is a story of desire, of the drive to be noticed and singled out, of college students' entry exploration of love versus lust, beauty versus grotesque, honesty versus pretension, and how these lines are so easily blurred when one is living in a 'bubble' that is an east coast liberal arts college.



Of course, this novella slapped me in the face as it brought me back to my senior year, when art history was the most important subject in my life though I was hard at work directing a play which was an adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses for my thesis.


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