Paint The Beast Pretty is the story of an intelligent, talented, rational man who, when he finds his life a shambles and himself in final extremis, abandons the reasoned, hard reality of his life and paints it over with a prettier, softer reality, a chimeric, mystical, magical reality. Only after the end of his life do we fully grasp the extent of the reality he was driven to evade in order to justify himself.

But it is not his search for a prettier reality that precipitates the events that unfold this story,
it is his jealousy and paranoia and an envelope he receives in the mail, an envelope whose contents may impel him to a feeling of overpowering anger and to macho acts of vicious, bloody retribution, acts necessary to the salvation of his honor, of his manhood.