Shelly's Book Blog

I ran across The Beasties, by William Sleator, when I was helping a patron at the library to find books about ecology. In this story, loggers' clearcutting a forest has the unintended effect of harming a strange human-like animal family knows as "the beasties," who live underground. The beasties are missing body parts -- an eye here, a nose there, and they have taken to abducting loggers and those who work with them in order to get replacement parts. It's rather grisly and more of a horror story than I expected. The writing is simple and, to my ear anyway, uninspired. I read one of Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak books a long time ago, and I was reminded of that story while reading The Beasties. Horror fans will probably love this book, but it simply was not the type of book I enjoy. I do appreciate the pro-enviromental message of the story, however. The idea that cutting down trees is akin to mutilating the members of a secret family of "beasties" may be far-fetched, but the visceral images this story invokes are still powerful.