Synopsis
The stories in Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart are about the abomination that resides within us all. That churning, clawing, ravenous yearning: the hunger to be held, and seen, and known. And the terror, too: to be loved too well, or not enough, or for long enough. To be laid bare before your sweetheart, to their horror. To be recognized as the monstrous thing you are.
Two teenage girls working at a sinister roadside attraction called the Eternal Staircase explore its secrets—and their own doomed summer love. A zombie rooster plays detective in a missing persons case. A woman moves into a new house with her acclaimed artist boyfriend—and finds her body slowly shifting into something specially constructed to accommodate his needs and whims. A pack of middle schoolers turn to the occult to rid themselves of a hated new classmate. And a pair of outcasts, a vampire and a goat woman, find solace in each other, even as the world’s lack of understanding might bring about its own end.
In these lush, strange, beautifully written stories, GennaRose Nethercott explores human longing in all its diamond-dark facets to create a collection that will redefine what you see as a beast, and make you beg to have your heart broken.
Quick Review
A collection of folklore-inspired stories that are both familiar and unsettling. Nethercott plays with format in delightful ways, not the least of which is the book’s encyclopedic section of spooky beasts.
Full Review
Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart begins with the story “Sundown at the Eternal Staircase.” We meet a couple of girls working at the local theme park, built around an endless pit that descends into the Earth. Nobody knows how deep it is. The pit is at the center of everything in this story: the way commercialism takes priority over the community’s well-being, and the mystery of it which drives a wedge between the girls. It is both deeply familiar and unsettling at once.
Just after that story, “A Diviner’s Abecedarian” is our first taste of Nethercott’s play with format. It is divided into twenty-six parts that are named for different types of divination, in alphabetical order (from Alomancy to Zoomancy). Each refers to the events of that part in both subtle and obvious ways, leaning at different times toward darker or comical features of the dark arts. While the story ultimately ends violently, it also features a section that got me laughing the most during this read. The kind of laughter where you look around the room, then back at the book, to see if you really just read what you just read.
These stories are odd, dark, and whimsical all at the same time. However, each is rooted in extremely personal, human concepts. “Downing Lessons” contrasts a girl cursed to drown at every opportunity against her brother, who feels his high school crush slipping away. “Homebody” deals with the way a person can lose themselves trying to please a loved one—and how that isn’t necessarily a shameful thing, if it’s what one wants.
The titular “Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart” is quite an odd story—if it can be called that. It is a “story” in that “it takes up a significant amount of space in this collection.” However, it is fundamentally different in the way that it’s presented.
“Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart” contains only a couple pages of prose in the form of an introduction. The rest are formatted as brief articles about different spooky creatures, each one illustrated. A few of the stand-outs for me included the Jigsaw-Bee (an insect which collects the wings off other insects and attaches them to itself), the Getly (whose singing lures people to climb into its mouth and become devoured), and the Velnip (a beast which can track anything—and will tear itself apart to cover the wounds of its mates and young).
I would highly recommend Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart, and encourage you to approach it with an open mind. Nethercott’s folklore-inspired tales delve into the supernatural and occult at times, and she tells them in at times in atypical ways. However, all of that is exactly why I enjoyed this collection.
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