Beast by Matt Wesolowski

This is the fourth novel in the author’s Six Stories series and once again we’re with podcaster Scott King as he investigates a mysterious event over six episodes, in each one speaking to someone with a different perspective of what occurred. 

King has journeyed to the small town of Ergath on the north east coast of England, to investigate the grisly murder of Elizabeth Barton, a beauty and lifestyle YouTube vlogger. Elizabeth was participating in a viral internet challenge, the Dead in Six Days challenge, where participants were set a dare by a vampire. They had to do the dare and then pass it on, or the vampire would own their soul. But Elizabeth refused to pass on the dare, wanting to do each dare herself until the sixth day when she would supposedly meet the vampire herself. 

Ergath has a local legend of its own vampire, supposedly brought to the town during the Crimean War and imprisoned in a tower, the ruins of which still stand on the seafront. Elizabeth’s involvement in the Dead in Six Days challenge takes place to the backdrop of the town’s mythology and occurs during the Beast from The East – the frozen weather front which came in from Siberia in 2018 and froze sections of the UK. Each of the dares that Elizabeth is set during the challenge becomes a little more extreme until she is meant to meet the vampire in the tower. It is here that she is locked inside by three local young men, dies of hypothermia, and then one of them beheads her.

Throughout King’s investigation it is never really in doubt who killed Elizabeth Barton. The evidence against her killers is overwhelming. But the questions that King wants to discover is why they killed her, and if possible, the men’s differing levels of culpability. To do this, he is soon looking into both killers and victim and discovering that not everything is what it seems. The story has always been that Elizabeth was a beautiful, popular, and kind person involved in charity work; her killers’ oddballs and loners. That Elizabeth’s killers murdered her at least in part due to jealousy (the other reason being that one of them believed her to be a vampire). But King soon finds other perspectives, that Elizabeth had secrets and that the killers were not the cardboard cut-out villains they had been portrayed.

Beast is a complex novel. There are elements of horror with the legend of the vampire, but that is not what this novel is really about. Rather, Beast is about social media, the pressure to conform, the pile in and witch-hunts that can occur on social media platforms, the challenges and games people can play on social media (and how sometimes these are hyped up in press scare stories). It is also about small towns hollowed out by deindustrialisation, and how the poverty and lack of services that plague such places can lead people to spiral out of control.  

This is a great read and the Six Stories series continues to impress.

5 out of 5 stars