PLOT DEVELOPMENT. When the novel opens, the narrator and Roy have been working for nearly a month without success to create the “Beast” they need for their movie

When the novel opens, the narrator and Roy have been working for nearly a month without success to create the “Beast” they need for their movie. On Halloween night, the narrator finds an anonymous note in his office directing him to come to Green Glades Park at midnight to experience a “great revelation…. [m]aterial for a best-selling novel or superb screenplay!” (6). Despite his fears, the narrator hires a taxi and goes, only to discover someone apparently climbing out of the cemetery on a ladder. The someone is the body of James Charles Arbuthnot, the former head of the studio who died in an accident twenty years before.

The narrator and the taxi driver flee, leaving behind the body, which had fallen off the ladder. The next day, the narrator meets a famous director, Fritz Wong, and goes to Stage 13 to talk with Roy. Roy’s past history of pranks leads the narrator to think that he may have been responsible for the body in the cemetery. Roy has created a Green Town set, reconstructing the house and neighborhood of the narrator’s grandparents. The two men sit in the set’s porch swing talking, and Roy convinces him that he was not responsible for the plot. Their conversation is interrupted by Manny Leiber, the head of the studio, demanding action on their monster movie.

Later, the narrator and Roy search for the body from the cemetery and find it in the carpenter’s shop on the studio lot. They leave it when Manny Leiber arrives with a group of workmen, who also discover the body. Roy receives an anonymous note telling him to come to the Brown Derby restaurant to find the Beast, and he and the narrator go together. At the restaurant, they see a horrendously mutilated man, the perfect Beast. When the man realizes they are looking at him, he tries to leave. They follow him to the Church of St. Sebastian, where they overhear him speaking to a priest then weeping.

The sight of this mutilated man inspires both men: the narrator to begin writing, Roy to create a model later described by the narrator as “the finest work he had ever done, a proper thing to glide from a far-traveling light-year ship, a hunter of midnight paths across the stars, a dreamer alone behind his terrible, awful, most dreadfully appalling mask” (79). This Beast is a completely accurate recreation of the mutilated man they had seen at the Brown Derby.

Manny responds angrily to the model: he fires Roy and orders him from the studio, and says he will reassign the narrator to a different project. The narrator goes to visit Elmo Crumley, a police detective and friend. While the narrator is celebrating the publication of Elmo’s novel with him, he gets a call from Roy, dashes back to the studio, and discovers a scene that he compares to one from Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera, which he saw when he was five years old: the shadow of a man who has hung himself. He sees what appears to be Roy’s body and, beneath it, the destroyed model of the Beast. At that moment, Doc Phillips comes in with a crew of men, removes Roy’s body, and clears out all his personal belongings.

The narrator is determined to discover what is going on inside the studio. The narrator soon comes to believe that Roy is not dead, but hiding out at the studio in disguise. While investigating, the narrator also has to work on the required ending for Fritz Wong’s film, a biblical story to which he has been reassigned. The same group of people who are working on the film—Fritz Wong, J.C., Stanislau Groc, and Maggie Botkin—all turn out to have been present twenty years ago when Arbuthnot died. The narrator finally decides to go to Constance Rattigan for help, but at first the former star does not tell him what she knows about the studio’s past. A number of mysterious events and more deaths occur.

Persevering, the narrator is able to solve the mystery: he confronts the Beast, who is the horribly mutilated Arbuthnot, and learns how Arbuthnot scripted a coverup, helped by Fritz Wong and others who worked at the studio. Arbuthnot’s affair with Emily Sloane was discovered at a Halloween party by her husband, which led to a car chase and an accident. The husband was killed, Emily left mad, and Arbuthnot mutilated. They put out a cover story that everyone died in the accident. Constance took Emily to the sanitarium, and Doc Phillips managed to keep Arbuthnot alive to run his film studio through Manny Leiber. The four who knew about the coverup were Doc, Groc, Manny, and J. C. Fritz and Constance knew some of it, but not that Arbuthnot had survived. The four who knew were paid five thousand dollars a week for life.

What initiated the most recent events at the studio was Doc’s discovery that Arbuthnot had cancer. One of the original four conspirators learned about the cancer and started trying to blackmail more money from the studio by means of the “joke” involving the body on the ladder that the narrator found. Arbuthnot, trying to figure out who was acting against him, destroyed Roy’s model and miniatures. Roy, wanting revenge, made himself up as the Beast, trapped Arbuthnot, and ran the studio himself.

The narrator finally goes to the Notre Dame set (from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which features the monstrously deformed Quasimodo) and meets Roy on top of the cathedral. Roy takes off the mask and makes his own confession: he arranged his own apparent suicide after finding his work destroyed, made himself up as the Beast, and trapped him. He could then be the Beast and run the studio, and he found he loved the power. He released the Beast only when he became horrified to find himself plotting to kill the narrator, his best friend, to maintain his secret and his control of the studio.

At the end, Arbuthnot dies and is truly buried. Manny Leiber is running the studio for real, and although he and the narrator profess continuing hatred for each other, the narrator is willing to write for him in the future. The investigators are all celebrating at the narrator’s house when his wife, Peg, returns from her conference to discover a scantily clad Constance biting the narrator’s ear.

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