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A review by tasharobinson
The Last Unicorn: The Lost Journey by Peter S. Beagle
4.0
I don't always enjoy the cultural obsession with how the sausage gets made — I tend to just want to watch a film or read a book or look at a painting, not see all the rough drafts and false starts and rightfully cut scenes and preliminary sketches that lead up to it. But The Last Unicorn is such a profound favorite of mine, and Peter Beagle is one of my all-time favorite authors. How could I resist a look at where the story might have gone?
This early, uncompleted draft of Last Unicorn starts off much like the published version, but there's no Red Bull, no King Haggard, ultimately no explanation for where the unicorns went. Instead, there's a fading, fussy dragon and a demon exiled from hell, and a lightly sketched setting that appears to be completely modern, with cars and cigarettes and highways. There's also a lengthy afterward by Beagle himself, talking about the summer when he began this book, how he was living, and what was on his mind.
It's pretty slight — just over 150 pages — and the kind of thing that whets the appetite for even more of this alternate-universe take on a beloved classic. But it's still very exciting to see how fully formed Beagle already was as an author back then, and to get new characters from him, and a familiar old character drawn in different ways, and placed in a different world. I don't think this will make anyone regret how the actual novel turned out, but it's a fascinating side-trip into a forgotten, discarded, but well-realized corner of Beagle's world.
This early, uncompleted draft of Last Unicorn starts off much like the published version, but there's no Red Bull, no King Haggard, ultimately no explanation for where the unicorns went. Instead, there's a fading, fussy dragon and a demon exiled from hell, and a lightly sketched setting that appears to be completely modern, with cars and cigarettes and highways. There's also a lengthy afterward by Beagle himself, talking about the summer when he began this book, how he was living, and what was on his mind.
It's pretty slight — just over 150 pages — and the kind of thing that whets the appetite for even more of this alternate-universe take on a beloved classic. But it's still very exciting to see how fully formed Beagle already was as an author back then, and to get new characters from him, and a familiar old character drawn in different ways, and placed in a different world. I don't think this will make anyone regret how the actual novel turned out, but it's a fascinating side-trip into a forgotten, discarded, but well-realized corner of Beagle's world.