Fresh out of ministerial school at twenty-three, Jude has taken over his ailing father’s position as a pastor in their small hometown in Texas. At the pulpit, he preaches about “hedonistic” desires. Overlooking the pews, he sees a familiar face: Dante, the seventeen-year-old he once knew before leaving for school. Before, when Jude’s future was open—a football scholarship, a BA in the humanities at college, some travel. Then came his father’s heart attack and the return to in his hometown, back “under God’s eye” (p. 33). So, serving his fathers (both biological and divine), Jude is entitled to something, right? “Give me one thing,” he pleads to his bible. “Give me one thing, out of all I give” (p. 35).
That thing is Dante.
M. Jane Worma’s novella Of Beasts begins in flagrante delicto, to put it delicately; Jude may quote Leviticus but he doesn’t practice what he preaches. Jude and Dante meet clandestinely. No one knows about them. The local pastor sleeping with a congregant would not go over well. To complicate matters, Dante may be the Antichrist.
Of Beasts fashions itself as a queer apocalyptic story in which emotions and stakes run high. Early in the novella, during a night when Jude and Dante are sleeping in the same bed, each receives the first of what they increasingly realize are religious visions. Whereas Dante is instructed by a booming voice to “go to Jerusalem” and “sit on the throne of Solomon” (p. 11), Jude is told that he will “slay Dante, and the beast will rise” (p. 23). One is charged with destroying the world, the other with doing the same to his lover. Given another secret to manage, the two must navigate their relationship as pastor and Antichrist—and, moreover, what it means for the world.
If Jude sounds like a problematic sadboy, one that would send Tumblr-users’ fingers in a flurry across their keyboards, you wouldn’t be wrong. He is a biblical Kylo Ren, doomed to serve the father but can never live up to him; beautiful but not available. It’s kind of an undeniable personality. Worma seeks to enhance Jude’s character—and his dynamic with Dante—by imbuing him with “sadistic” qualities. (The marketing copy, in point of fact, describes Jude as a “sadistic pastor.”) Of Beasts maps the dom-sub dynamic onto fairly rote roles. Jude, having the power in the relationship (at least initially) as a community leader, tops; Dante bottoms. Jude was the one to seduce Dante; Jude decides when they meet; Dante identifies Jude’s “raw primal need to wring out blood, cries, submission” (p. 2). But, like so many of these sadboy characters popular in twenty-first-century culture, Jude’s sadism is rather unconvincing: During sex, he once chokes Dante a little too long; he can be a bit selfish; he ignores Dante for a small stretch of the novella. Mostly though, Jude makes Dante coffee in the morning.
There is another aspect of their relationship that further complicates Of Beasts, a detail that Worma alludes to in the first chapter but clarifies later on: Dante’s age. Dante is seventeen when the novella starts. To be fair, that is the age of consent in Texas. While I’m uninterested in reprimanding a book for portraying a relationship that many may find unsettling, Dante’s age provides insight into what both compels and, ultimately, does not work about Of Beasts. Jude and Dante are not members of the Catholic Church, but their age and power difference is enough to bring to mind the myriad abuses that have for decades rightly horrified Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Whether Worma hopes to invoke this context, it hangs over their novella.
Consequently, when Jude and Dante inevitably butt heads over this whole one-of-us-must-kill-the-other-to-follow-God’s-will business, the emerging power differential gives some spark to Of Beasts. Dante’s response to Jude in this passage brims with potential:
“That’s why…” Jude laughed, low and bitter. “I was so guilty when all this time, I’ve just been fucking the Antichrist.”
Dante’s head snapped up to him, eyes wide.
“Does that make you feel any better?” Dante bit. He crossed his arms, took a step back. “Is everything suddenly okay if I’m evil? Can you do no wrong to me?” (p. 47)
If Dante is indeed the Antichrist, and will come to awful power in all the ways that his dreams tell him, the pastor of a tiny Texan town no longer carries much weight. Here is an inversion of a power dynamic. Will Dante, this submissive teenager, take the upper hand? In doing so, will Of Beasts guide us through why Worma consistently refers to Dante as “the teen”?
Later, when the novella climaxes (albeit abruptly), I anticipated Jude might face some consequences. Unfortunately, the couple’s uneven power is largely an aesthetic choice with little effect on the novella’s plot or thematics. Its sensibility tends towards the poetic, sometimes overly so, and the nebulous. It has a little bit of that Hot Topic flair—brooding and edgy, sometimes without earning it. Proffering a stylistic tone or aesthetic choice is certainly no crime. It is in fact often the mark of a good writer, yet Worma fails to marry their style with the novella’s thrust. Although it certainly feels that Of Beasts wants to make a point about power, it’s unclear what it is. Worma comes close to something stellar near the end of the novella when Dante questions his role.
“[he] wondered if Jesus wasn’t actually the first child—if Jesus was the only son who did what he was supposed to, the first to turn away from temptation. He wondered if there wasn’t another Antichrist before him, maybe several more, a long chain of his kind that all ended up too in awe of and in love with the world to hurt it” (p. 104).
Despite Worma’s ability to string sentences together well, Of Beasts has myriad hiccups. For too much of the novella, Dante is underdeveloped. Characters are often hard to distinguish from one another. Even Jude, who has more to do, is not particularly fleshed out. When, at multiple instances, the third-person point of view changes between Jude and Dante within a single paragraph, it is often necessary to reread passages because the characterizations fail to clearly indicate whom we’re meant to be with. Having finished the novella in one sitting, I had the strong sense that a skilled editor would’ve been indispensable: Conceptually captivating, its shallow characters and awkward pacing nonetheless prove to be too much to overcome.
At just over a hundred pages, Of Beasts strives to examine an entanglement of religious hypocrisy, duty, and queer desire. Worma is obviously interested in complex ideas. Of Beasts, however, cannot contain them. Even the content of this review feels like extrapolation of character to me, an endeavor to make sense of a novella that is obviously interested in nuanced ideas but fails to execute them.