Bram Stoker Award-winning horror author Paul Tremblay (Survivor Song; Growing Things and Other Stories; The Cabin at the End of the World) offers 15 genre-bending gems in his second story collection, The Beast You Are. In "Ice Cold Lemonade 25¢ Haunted House Tour: 1 Per Person"--which blurs the lines between fiction and memory in ways reminiscent of Tremblay's novel The Pallbearer's Club--an outcast kid uncovers a potential connection and an uncanny, nightmarish creature in the house of his crush. "Mostly Size" and "Red Eyes" feature a boy and girl, respectively, facing the enormity of what they are meant to fear and finding affinities they didn't know they had. Finally, in the collection's masterful concluding novella, "The Beast You Are," a society of anthropomorphic animals traces the lives of two survivors of a violent sacrificial rite.
With unmatched consistency, Tremblay undertakes in enlightening ways the horror tropes that clearly haunt him. With an achingly '80s/'90s nostalgia and almost-comic sensibility, most of the stories in this collection center the experiences of children. This emotionally grounds the weight of their shiver-inducing scares. Although these stories confront what it means to actually see the monster that lurks in the shadows, they also tend to find their climaxes in quiet but nonetheless essential revelations, rather than in their gore-filled atrocities. Perhaps this is why the stories that resonate (purposefully or not) as pandemic stories, such as "The Blog at the End of the World" and "I Know You're There," succeed at communicating the horror of despair, grief, and intangible escalation without burying themselves beneath the weight of an all-too-soon present. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor