Books/Beast
Novel · Young readers
Beast
Adam says he cannot remember the two months he went missing in a Florida swamp. That is not true. He remembers exactly what stood in the road.
The story
Adam claims he cannot recall the two months he spent missing in a Florida swamp. He can. He remembers the wreck — his father swerving to miss something enormous standing in the highway — and he remembers what happened to his parents afterward.
Nobody believes the part about the creature. Saying it out loud once was enough to make him a joke and a problem. So he goes back into the swamp alone to find the truth about what took his parents, and finds something considerably more alarming, and more interesting, than the thing he went in looking for.
The novel is grounded in a real trip and a real experience of Watt’s own, set out in an author’s note at the back.
Details
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus and Giroux
- Audience
- Ages 10 and up
- ISBN
- 9780374313692
- Setting
- The Florida swamp
Reviews
What they said.
Walking a fine line between the fantastic and the realistic, Key creates a scary, page-turning adventure spun from his own experience (set forth in an author’s note)… This compelling cryptid fantasy has its big feet planted firmly in realistic survival fiction.
Kirkus ReviewsIf this is your first Watt Key
Beast is the strangest of the novels but it is built the same way as the rest of them: a young person alone outdoors, working the problem with what they actually know.
Start with Alabama Moon →Read next
More from the same water.
Novels for young readers, Southern fiction for grown ones, and nonfiction from the delta.
Alabama Moon
A boy raised in the forest loses the only person who knew he was out there.
Terror at Bottle Creek
A category-three hurricane, an Indian mound, two girls, and a bear in the next tree.
Hideout
Sam finds a boy living alone in the swamp, and starts telling small lies that get large.