In the horror novel 'Sacrificial Animals', the violence of rural life is mixed with Chinese myth

In Kailee Pedersen’s debut horror novel, “Sacrificial Animals,” things quickly turn dark. It’s dark and chillingly bloody. The author writes a macabre paean to violence, drawing inspiration from a variety of literary and mythological sources.

At first, Pedersen writes in the tradition of a frontier “King Lear”: two sons vying for the affection and inheritance of a petulant father as he rages against the world. Think “Yellowstone,” but crueler, with a “glass-eyed stag’s head” guarding the gate. Jane Smiley fans, beware: Pedersen shows no mercy to These Thousand Acres, leaning hard into disturbing detail and gore.

“Sacrificial Animals” opens at Stag’s Crossing, the sprawling farm of Carlyle Morrow, a widowed, barbaric patriarch who rules the land, a pack of trap-mouthed greyhounds, his emotions, and his two teenage sons with all the subtlety of an axe. In the story’s opening pages, Carlyle drags his sons out of bed in the middle of the night to hunt down a mother fox who has messed with the chickens. He wreaks his vengeance on her young in a merciless scene of cruelty and “savage omophagy,” forcing his sons to be complicit in their deaths in an attempt to pass on his own cold inhumanity to the next generation.

In alternating “Then” and “Now” chapters, Pedersen follows Carlyle’s tender younger son, Nick, as he comes to realize he will never live up to his father’s harsh ideal. Carlyle’s violence is “sharp and beautiful as the silver curve of the hook. Nick is gentler and maybe even fawn-like, odd in some way. Formed in the image of his mother,” who died in childbirth along with a third brother. Joshua, the eldest son, is testosterone incarnate, the favorite.

When Nick recognizes that he cannot survive at Stag's Crossing, he leaves to nurture his budding queer identity and build a life in books, applying “his vicious and destructive intelligence to literary criticism” rather than hunting. The Favourite also soon falls out of favour with his father when Joshua marries Emilia, a woman of Asian descent, despite the patriarch's racism and distrust of outsiders. No one is safe from Carlyle's legacy of malice, and he finds himself alone.

Adult Nick deals with the brutality of his childhood as much as he can and puts a lot of distance between himself and Carlyle. He forgets what he can, but the acute pain of his father's tyrannical rule remains. When Carlyle calls to tell him he's dying of cancer, Nick is forced to return home and treat his open wounds. He also has to bridge the gap between himself and his long-estranged brother, who also returns, along with his wife, who immediately sets about nagging Nick.

Throughout the story, Pedersen maintains a sense of doom, building suspense and anticipation by reminding us that none of the sons ever fully escaped the evil their father wanted to instill in them or the imperative to return home. “Like dogs, the Morrows will come when called,” Pedersen writes, dehumanizing the sons in a repeated comparison.

Pedersen is ruthless. It is not a question of whether the story will end in death, but when, and who, and how extensive the devastation will be. Pedersen leads her characters and her readers menacingly toward oblivion. And in addition to its savagery, “Sacrificial Animals” is a Shakespearean tragedy: people control fate and each other; sons try to rebel against their father and their fates. Pedersen weaves haunting phrases from archaic language, and the novel builds with a frightening, anxious energy as the author reveals her connection to Chinese mythology.

While brotherly jealousy, generational pain, and malice govern the narrative, it also integrates elements of the supernatural. Not only is Nick sensitive, but he also “sometimes has premonitions, headaches, the pains of a seer.” Closeness to others reveals Nick’s ability to see into his past and experience his memories. This becomes especially important as he attempts to define himself in early adulthood, but his father and the farm present some blind spots. The reader knows more than he does, and we wonder how long it will take him to uncover the dark secret. Pedersen’s story raises questions about human and animal cruelty and implores us to look beyond assumptions about what a soul can be. Identity is mutable. Sins are generational.

As the book nears its end, Pedersen’s story completely steps outside the bounds of reality, giving itself over to the fantastic and its mythological undercurrent. The novel’s final pages are a wild frenzy of beauty, vengeance, and viscera. A buffet of viscera. A stinking mass of rotting entrails sliding from an open wound. Is that too vague? It’s intentional. There’s a mystery at the heart of this story that parallels the recurring fox-hunt motif, and I don’t want to spoil it. It’s Nick’s slow realization of the depths of his complicity in his father’s violence that delivers the final punch.

Pedersen’s macabre tale draws together many disparate threads into a terrifying finale. “Sacrificial Animals” is notable for its sharp barbarity, the author’s blending of the ordinary violence of rural life with the gravity of a Chinese myth. Her characters live “only for the fierce hunt, the glorious betrayal. The suffering of others is its own delicacy,” she writes, “more pleasurable than that of raw meat.”

Heather Scott Partington is a professor at Elk Grove and president of the National Book Critics Circle.