Word: beastes
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...adultery with a slinky local deputy who seduces him with wine. No God-fearing person--indeed no survivor--drinks liquor in these novels; the temptress has no potion that can protect her when she meets the dragon. But powered by a last-minute conversion to Jesus, Benson wrestles the beast and eventually kills...
...BEAST: This 1926 silent-movie version of Moby Dick changed more than just the title. As "Ahab Ceeley," high-profile John Barrymore survives his duel with the Great White Whale--and gets a love interest. Critical reactions? The New York Times blubbered with praise, while allowing that "it would have been preferable ... to forgo the use of a property moon in one setting, as it is by no means realistic...
...Beast: A Reckoning with Depression (Putnam; 286 pages; $23.95), Tracy Thompson, a reporter for the Washington Post, provides a harrowing chronicle of her battle against the demon she calls "a psychic freight train of roaring despair." Thompson is uncommonly thoughtful on many levels--from her fearful childhood in a Southern fundamentalist family, to her confused entanglement with a harshly supportive man, to her hospitalization in a mental ward and her sunlit rescue by Prozac. Thompson's reporter's eye is unsparing, and she writes with tough grace. About one of her more hopeful moments: "Life did not get easier...
Childhood sexual abuse is a beast in many of these books. In Richard Hoffman's spare, poignant Half the House (Harcourt Brace; 175 pages; $20), it sneaks in almost laconically after the author has given us a searing picture of his blue-collar family in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s, with a violent but caring father and two brothers who are terminally ill. Hazy reverence for the Catholic saints is counterpointed with hazy submission to the sadistic coach who lures the author, then age 10, to his house with pornography and sodomizes him: "Induced, premature, with a hunger urgent...
...with the format," she chuckles. "With the Oscars and with Jay Leno, I was working within more parameters, but still, when things are live, it's the nature of the beast--they can't control...