Andy Hull has made a promise He has vowed to care for his nephew who suffers from a disorder so horrible it has left him a recluse and pushed away everyone he ever loved But to what lengths will Andy go to fulfill this promise and at what cost to himself or the woman he lovesBEAST is a dark and intimate novel about a man who has made a promise to care for his ill nephew who just happens to be a werewolf But not the kind of werewolf you might be used to Coxs monster is entirely human cursed not by a gypsy but by biology suffering from a disease that is completely organic and disturbingly real I made a list of everything thats normally included in a werewolf story Cox says And then I deliberately avoided all of them This helped give the story the kind of grit and realism I knew it needed This isnt a story set in some dark English castle There are no moors and no gypsy curses And there are certainly no romantic teenagers running around wasting time making googlyeyes at each other This is my attempt to write seriously about this kind of affliction and more importantly how that affliction affects the people around the man who has it The way the story is told is different as well Says Cox In many ways there is a story going on in Beast that could be told in a much more conventional way but that story is in the background I am interested in turning the camera just slightly offcenter and focusing on what would normally be offstage in another story I get bored with the focus always being the heart of the action When a person is killed by a monster lets say I always think of their family The fact that a monster killed their loved one would really be secondary to the simple fact of their loss Its that background story I find more interesting the one going on at the outskirts of the main action or what would more conventionally be seen as the main action With Beast another writer might have focused on entirely different characters and tell an entirely more conventional story Cox chose to keep that conventional story in the background and let it come in and out of focus in the readers mind The result is a novel of realism and pathos a character portrait focusing on those who love the unfortunately inflicted soul with a depth and grit and realism not usually seen in this genre