Pity the Beast by Robin McLean

What's the earth to a horse? A place to place the hoof, a cradle of grass, a prop to rest his nose while rippling grass out by the roots. And the Herd would have had no interest in eons. Seasons maybe, days maybe, the change of the wind certainly, the daylight hours on their pelts. No interest in geysers. In salt licks, maybe. Horse was a watcher, a minder of his own business, with eyes screwed in on the side of his tin-can skull, peripheral observer, yes, but what of those objects right in front of his nose? Expert in grass and wind, in the locations where rodents bored their holes, since such pits would break a forelock with one misstep. And then Horse would be left by his Herd. And then Wolf would come.

A mare is giving birth; the foal is too big, because she's been impregnated by the neighbor's immense Percheron horse. The couple who own the ranch work together to save the life of mare and foal, but they can't stop bickering, because the Percheron isn't the only neighbor who's been where he shouldn't be: Dan has recently discovered that his wife Ginny has been sleeping with the next door rancher. As the work continues, more people show up, partly to help with the mare, but partly to insult Ginny and upbraid her for her infidelity, among them her own sister Ella and Ella's husband Saul. The insults turn to violence when this crew beats and gang-rapes Ginny and throws her in the lime pit which is meant to dissolve the bodies of dead animals. But Ginny isn't dead; she climbs out and rides away, with her pursuers on the trail behind her.

I was blown away by the first part of Pity the Beast. The way that McLean slowly amplifies the anger and hatred the others have toward Ginny, at the same time they are ostensibly working together to save the mare and foal, is rich in irony and crackling with hate. It's easy to see the influence here of Cormac; the West in Pity the Beast is depicted as a point in eternity's long arc, and we are made to understand the hatred of Dan and others as something that is primeval. At the same time, there are suggestions that the West has become a diminished place, performative in nature rather than real: among Ginny's other pursuers are a deputy from New Jersey who writes postcards to his mother about his cowboying (and how he thinks Ginny must be single now), and a young teen in a ridiculous Western get-up called "the Kid."

That said, I thought the remainder of Pity the Beast failed to live up to the promise of the first section. The pursuit goes on for days, weeks, months; it goes on so long we are no longer supposed to wonder in any literal sense how long it is taking. The characters have reentered the West of myth. But this flight into myth leaves the narrative rather obscure, sometimes almost impossible to read for plot. For every interesting or novel touch, like the bits of "Mule thoughts" shared among the pursuers' mule pack, there's one that is impenetrable: I have no idea, for example, what's up with the short science fiction passages where a future scientist is doing a census of the world's cedar trees. In the end, the novel makes the same error as Dan, Ella, Saul, their tracker and their mule driver: it never should have followed Ginny into the wilderness in the first place.