The Beast and the Bethany

The Beast and the Bethany by Jack Meggitt-Phillips is a gleefully horrible story for 8 year olds about a beautiful young man of five hundred and eleven.

What happens

Ebenezer Tweezer looks about twenty. He has fifteen floors of house, more fridges than he can use, no friends to bother him and no intention of ever growing old.

The arrangement is simple. Up at the top of the house, behind a set of red velvet curtains, lives a beast. Ebenezer feeds it whatever it fancies and it is sick up whatever he asks for. Chandeliers. A witch's broom. A baby grand piano, slightly slimy. And every year, the potion that keeps his face the way it is.

In the first chapter he buys a rare purple parrot called Patrick, who is charming and polite and sings a song about how marvellous the beast is. Then the beast asks Patrick to come a little closer.

That is a warning about this book and also the reason people love it. Ebenezer is a monster in a nice coat, and the story finds him very funny without ever pretending he's a good man. A wonderful life, it says, can turn someone into a terrible person.

Then the beast wants something new. It wants a child.

So how does a man who has never had anything to do with children go about getting one? Badly, is the answer, and watching him try is the best comic writing in the book. He takes a large bag to the zoo and asks children to climb in, which does not go well and ends in a lifetime ban. He sets up a sweet stall with sleeping powder in the stock and falls asleep in a strawberry fancy himself. He asks the man in the bird shop whether he has any children for sale, and the bird shop man, entirely misunderstanding, suggests the orphanage.

What to read next

So. A talking parrot is eaten in the first chapter, off the page but not in any doubt, and the plot from there is a man shopping for a child to feed to a monster. If that lands wrong for your reader, it will land very wrong, and it isn't worth pushing. If they loved The Twits, though, this is exactly their sort of nastiness. Mr and Mrs Twit are the smelliest, ugliest pair in the world, they spend their days playing revolting tricks on each other, and the monkeys locked in their garden have had quite enough of it.