Bless the Beasts and Children

Glendon Swarthout

We hear about getting back to basics all the time in music. Some artist gets sick of overorchestrating and overproducing and goes back out on the road with just the piano, or the guitar, or whatever, and plays all the old stuff. So why is it we almost never hear of the back-to-basics philosophy coming from writers?

This is basics, right here. Twenty-seven years into his publishing career, Glendon Swarthout released Bless the Beasts and Children, and a simpler novel it's hard to find. It's the story of six outcasts at a "cowboy camp" in Arizona, finally pushed over the edge by the mindless cruelty of those around them, and what they do for revenge. The story is told partly in the present day and partly in flashbacks.

It's interesting to note that many people's first experience with this novel (at least, those not old enough to remember the 1973 movie, complete with syrupy-sweet Carpenters title tune) is coming in school. Swarthout himself never considered Bless the Beasts and Children a novel for kids, and neither does his son (who runs the Glendon Swarthout Website; BtB&C is listed with the novels for adults, rather than the novels for teens). While my first experience with it came in sixth grade, and I enjoyed it at that time, reviews from school-age readers are overwhelmingly bad. As is the case with most of what's forced down kids' throats in school, no one putting together the canon ever thought about whether the novel's devices are too subtle or too slow-moving for the adolescent mind. That could very well be the case here; the plot comes out through the characterizations, making for a relatively slow-moving novel, albeit a gripping one. Come on, teachers, assign it as extra credit and let the rest of the world come to it after the kids who really like it recommend it to them. This is a book that gets better as the reader gets older.