Louis Bayard's Roosevelt's Beast blends historical fiction with horror in a suspenseful imagining of an American president and his son facing down a nightmare in the dense jungles of Brazil.
Though aging former president Theodore Roosevelt is known for his adventuring, his wife insists their second son accompany him on an Amazonian expedition in 1914. The journey goes poorly from the beginning. When a lack of food leads Theodore and Kermit to hunt too far from camp, father and son are kidnapped by an Amazon tribe and expected to save their captors from an elusive beast that disembowels its victims. Aided by a longtime captive named Luz and her son, Thiego, the Roosevelts stalk and slay the Beast, but Kermit finds himself unable to join wholeheartedly in the tribe's celebration. A sixth sense tells him that the animal they killed was a red herring, that the Beast still lives and now inhabits one of his companions.
Bayard (The School of Night) reimagines the real-life Roosevelt expedition--as recounted in Candace Millard's The River of Doubt--in a tense and brooding manner that never fails to deliver chills and peril in a claustrophobic jungle atmosphere. His ability to capture the delicate relationship between a giant of a man and the son who struggles to come into his own brings an unexpectedly touching aspect to an often-brutal story. This journey into darkness strikes enough notes that a variety of readers will find an element to tempt them, whether it's the terrifying unknown or the simple desires of the human heart. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads