The Beast in View

⚖The case for it

It starts on a telephone. The calls escalate, and Millar builds dread out of a disembodied voice rather than anything physical, which readers find worse. Helen Clarvoe is a rich shut-in written as a convincing woman in trouble rather than a damsel, and the 1950s Los Angeles of hotel suites and switchboards keeps her sealed in. The prose is the other pleasure, sharp even on a hotel clerk who gets one line, and readers describe a book “bursting with amazing lines that I wish I’d written.” Under 250 pages, finished in a sitting. A critic calls it “an eerily horrifying tour de force.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Seventy years of imitation have caught up with it, and a fair number of readers see where it is going. Helen never goes to the police despite escalating threats, which several readers flag as a plausibility hole. The investigative middle slackens after the opening, and the romance with the investigator gets two pages of development before it is asked to matter. Frequent “time jumps and sudden speaker shifts” send readers back to reread. And the handling of a gay supporting character is dated in a way that sits apart from the mystery entirely.

— the honest librarian

5h

honest hours

7

sittings