But his ambition is to transcend the specifics of time and place, to write a meditation on literature itself and its ability to reveal the raging, brutal, brilliant beast that is mankind itself.
At first, his characters seem only brutal and repulsive, beasts who are "tired, drained, and reduced," but the story uncovers their humanity and tenderness.
After E3 2004, Jaffe told IGN that the creative team's goal was to "make the player feel brutal, letting their inner beast free and just going nuts".
Hunting lay at the heart of that doctrine: the virile business of learning to shoot straight, to track beasts through brutal heat or cold and to master "buck fever"—a nervous excitement felt in the face of prey that must be suppressed by effort of will.
The animal's herd quickly fled the scene as the hungry reptiles chowed down, but the battle of the beasts reflects a brutal, yet necessary encounter in the animal kingdom.
Or will Oscar voters be impressed that Ben Kingsley, their 1982 choice for best actor in "Gandhi", can also play a brutal cockney gangster, in "Sexy Beast"?
It could also turn out that journalists who believed in him for years could turn on him, as Buzz Bissinger did in a brutal post Monday on the Daily Beast.
The Hammer, as he is known, is a much more ferocious political beast than Mr Lott and especially brutal when cornered.
There were "violent confrontations with wild beasts" and "performances over time became more brutal and bloodier".
