A review of A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang
words by Inés Paris
This debut novel by Alice Evelyn Yang, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing, is a historical family saga that weaves together the stories of a village, a lineage, and the monsters that haunt them. It is also a story about belonging and migration. The novel is circular in structure: the present continually slips into the past, and memory blends with myth until the boundaries dissolve. Within that frame, Yang explores nature and magic realism, women’s roles, political violence, and cultural loss.
One’s family is not a brief tempest but a lifetime of mist. A fog, whose wet texture of hurt would always be there, washing over them¹
At the novel’s core lies a question voiced through Qianze, the main character: What makes us who we are? Are we shaped by our parents’ histories, by the stories we tell ourselves, or by what we try to build anew? Can we escape blood and family—and if we can, should we? These questions become our own as the narrative unfolds, which is what the best novels compel us to do.
photo by Fiza Niaz
When Qianze’s estranged father, Weihong, re-enters her life, barely conscious, she confronts not only her memories but his: “The only homelands I have is him and my Ma. I don’t belong anywhere, just to them. How can I toss him aside?”². The novel’s meditation on identity is inherently tied to the parts of ourselves capable of monstrosity. We are presented with the Oni (the Japanese name) or the Yaoguai (the Chinese version), and in the end, the story clearly states that the worst monsters are human.
Spanning a century, the novel never strays far from its gravitational centre: violence. From rural China to New York City, generational trauma moves across continents and political systems, whether through war or corporate America. The violence the characters inflict and endure forms the novel’s persistent echo.
There will be women after this. There will be innocence after this. There will be girls who won’t know how it feels to be split by a monster crawling between your legs³
Nature and the environment are a fundamental part of this story: a place for omens to occur, but also a space for freedom and understanding of who we are. Magic realism and Chinese mythology seep into the cityscape; no matter how far Qianze runs, the culture she tries to escape pours back into her life. The Oni or Yaoguai are ambiguous creatures in Chinese folklore defined by the possession of supernatural powers. They are not evil in the sense Western demons are, like those found in religious imagery; they are usually weird and dangerous. There is a saying that goes “extraordinary occurrences are due to the yao”⁴. They can even be related to gods. These monsters represent the characters in terms of what they lose: Qianze as a monster because she has lost her language and her culture, Weihong as a Red Guard kid and as a father who abandons his daughter, and Qianze’s grandmother, Ming, as an addict who has to survive the Japanese invasion of China. Qianze becomes heir to these wounds—and the one tasked, whether willingly or not, with mending them.
She could learn a new language of existence, one where the words were softer and braver, less angry. Make peace with it eventually⁵
Yang threads the novel’s magic realism seamlessly. Present and past cannot escape each other, as if the reader were inside the Aunties’ prophecy the whole time, but also as if they were going down the rabbit hole of the lost memory of Qianze’s father. This dripping of magic into reality reaches a point where, as the story approaches its climax, voices merge and timelines drip into each other, much like the ink Qianze uses to illustrate her monsters. The reading experience becomes fluid—mirroring the unstable, liquid nature of memory itself.
The novel also offers a sharp portrayal of women’s roles in traditional Chinese families, contemporary diasporic life, and corporate America. Women are used as commodities; it is only natural that this oppression breeds frustration, anger, and in some cases, transformation—monstrosity created by the systems meant to contain them. Qianze’s grandmother, Ming, offers the most explicitly brutal example of this logic at work, her body rendered a site of social control and inherited fear.
Ming wasn’t upset. She was thinking of how many ways she could be ruined. She was thinking of how many paths would lead her back to a life spent with Mama if she didn’t bleed. If she slept with Fei before their wedding night, it was because he wanted to, because he found her new body attractive, because he was a boy and a firstborn son on top of that, who always got his way. If Shushu changed his mind. Her body was trying to ruin her. How she wished she could shed it and clothe herself in a new skin. An animal, an insect⁶
The promises made to women at birth, regarding their options in society and their future, concern their reproductive capabilities, whether for the species or the system. Once they cannot do any more of this, they are deemed useless. There are several generations of women in this novel, and Yang does a fantastic job of also representing their limitations in the East and the West alike.
She observed and catalogued the assortment of marriages and relationships in the village. A wife bound to her husband differed from how a mother was bound to her son, which differed from how she was bound to a daughter or a stillborn. Ming had been raised with the knowledge that one day, she would be someone’s wife, someone’s mother⁷
Political violence forms another layer of the narrative—Japan’s invasion of China, the brutality of the Red Guards, and Weihong’s participation in killings. These histories reinforce the novel’s circularity. Qianze is the only one who can break the spell, in both recovering memory and accepting the violence that has been imprinted in her story. Weihong, in particular, embodies a tragic, almost Oedipal inevitability: warned that he will become a monster, he does—by choosing survival over morality. Violence saturates even the most mundane spaces, symbolised grotesquely in the acts of Weihong around the city.
Weihong stepped back. His palms were wet with cruelty. The sky was flush with the ground, and when he raised his face to the warm waning sun, he felt - Divine⁸
Our violence was not literate. There were no words to describe what we did. Atrocity. Massacre. Bloodbath. They approached but did not capture. They missed the essence of our savagery -- which was that we enjoyed it. The lawlessness. The godliness⁹
If the novel has a limitation, it lies in its intense focus on monstrosity and identity. These themes repeat so consistently that the narrative’s emotional power thins at times. The sense of looming horror becomes predictable, and the central mystery of the novel resolves long before the novel reaches its final revelations. This repetition may be intentional, like an artistic echo of generational trauma, but it can occasionally slow the narrative’s momentum and make the reading experience fatiguing.
This book would be perfect for those who loved Pachinko, or The Mountains Sing, but with the added bonus that the mystic elements, the magic realism, pour into the streets of New York because in the end, what this book is saying is that we cannot escape the forces that shape us, but we can learn from them, and perhaps transform them: "Qianze was a by-product of him, and she wondered if she was capable of those same moral failings"¹⁰.
A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang will be published by Dead Ink Books on 19th February 2026. You can pre-order the book here.
--
Inés Paris Arranz holds an MA in North American Studies (with a mention in Literature and Visual Culture) from the Franklin Institute and an MA in Education, and is currently pursuing an MA in Hispanic Literatures (Basque, Catalan, and Galician). She works as a bookseller and has published poetry in literary magazines and reviews. Her first poetry collection appeared in 2023. Deeply interested in contemporary literature and literary retellings, she is based in Madrid and loves knitting. She is a book reviewer for Zimmer Magazine, an article writer and helps in any way she can with this great project.