With a stolen horse and rifle, she escapes into the mountains, and a small posse of her tormentors gears up to give chase—to bring her home and beg forgiveness, or to make sure she disappears for good? Since then he has devoted his time to the writing of fiction and has seen his various series of books translated into over forty-six languages and become bestsellers throughout the world. It is here that she is locked inside by three local young men, dies of hypothermia, and then one of them beheads her.

I didn’t particularly like him and as the story began to unfold, a story I found very predictable, it amazed and annoyed me that he seemed completely oblivious to what was clearly in front of him.

Tremblay wrote this one back in 2008, a good twelve years before COVID came into the picture and misinformation spread online like wildfire, so reading this was a bit surreal (and in the story notes he mentions it was surreal revisiting it now) because it almost predicted the way people would talk over each other, sow distrust, and disbelieve each other as things were falling apart around them. Meet Tom and Ellena, The heroes of Beast Quest, Beast Quest Series 8 6 Books Collection by Adam Blade. There were definitely some creepy moments in this one with a decent folklore tale, and I liked the setting of the small and cut off poverty stricken town that was rife with gossip and spooky legends. And again through the use of the gaze; ‘my eyes were level with those inside the mask that now evaded mine’ (p. With Beast it is like the line between fiction and reality is blurred, like you are standing on the boundary between two worlds and have one foot on the side of ‘story‘ and the other on the side of ‘it’s real‘.

Rather, Beast is about social media, the pressure to conform, the pile in and witch-hunts that can occur on social media platforms, the challenges and games people can play on social media (and how sometimes these are hyped up in press scare stories). King/Wesolowski challenge the accepted narrative by giving voice to the the ones who are often the voiceless in an effort to illuminate the many versions of the ‘truth’. His debut thriller, Six Stories, was a bestseller in the USA, Canada, the UK and Australia, and a WH Smith Fresh Talent pick, and TV rights were sold to a major Hollywood studio.The little town of Ergarth has its own vampire legend and everybody knows somebody who knows somebody else whose cousin / babysitter / granny has had a chance encounter with said vampire. I wish Scott King would be less effusive and just dealt with the elephant in the room more thoroughly. I mean, surely there would have been a huge fallout given what a big mystery the case was and how it was resolved? It's very easy to curate a beautiful life through photos and filters but what are we truly like when the camera is off. How ruthless they can be in their goal of getting to the top, how they control people, use and manipulate them.