The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber (1978)

I was a little disappointed with the police procedural fixation of Whitley Strieber’s 1978 novel The Wolfen from the get-go, even when it was relatively clean and somewhat evocative of the urban landscape in the earlier chapters of the novel. The setting and time period, New York City in the 1970s, could play host to an awesome story of mass hysteria, urban decay, and perhaps hedonism, not to mention werewolves, the way Spike Lee manages in Summer of Sam, with a real life serial killer. I can't think of a novel, offhand, that achieves this sort of 70s paranoia and delirium, but I'm sure they're out there. It seemed that Strieber completely forgot about his city after the cops were killed in the auto pound in the first section of the book. We get a decent description of the desolation in the Bronx, and a few upper Manhattan scenes (the fountain and the museum) that are bland and generic. The love triangle bit was useless and made the two cops much less interesting. I would’ve liked to see a bit more about Dick, our main character’s husband. He seems like a misunderstood guy who has been chewed up by the system, though Strieber pulls the heartstrings a bit too heavily when he has Dick spend the extorted money on taking care of his sick father. Come on. I could imagine someone, someone who wears Druid garb at conventions, reading this novel as a defense of the Wolfen. They are nobler beasts than we. They only kill the sick, old and weak. They live in harmony with their ecosystem. That’s baloney and not supported by the text (though knowing a bit about Strieber’s wacko ideas, he may have been aiming in that direction).

Strieber also seemed a little proud of himself concerning the idea about vampires being normal humans who leach off of the Wolfen. He made the guy at the Natural History Museum a little too credulous. All it took to convince him of the existence of sapient wolf-beings was an old etching in a silly book.

There is a 1981 film starring Albert Finney very loosely based on this novel, and I’d definitely recommend the film over the book in this case.

You can learn a bit more about Strieber's latest obsessions here.

The Beast Within by Edward Levy (1981)

The three acts of Edward Levy’s 1981 novel, The Beast Within are well-defined and each serves a distinct flavor of horror to the reader. In the first section, Levy creates a sense of gothic rural isolationism in the deep south of the 1930s, much akin to Cormac McCarthy’s early Appalachian novels. The second section drifts into a working class nightmare of misfortune that struck me as more Stephen King’s New England of the 1970s than the 1940s rural south Levy means it to be. Finally, the third act brings us into the 1950s, where the heart of this story of lycanthropy spreads open in a glossy and prosperous America innocent of the sins of the body.

Our werewolf, who is created in the first act by a religious zealot who locks him in a basement for over a decade and feeds him human flesh, makes this novel a bit of a science fiction experiment, as well as a horror novel. What if how we treat each other altered our genes? What if we passed down acquired tastes and predilections to our children? Michael, the offspring of this werewolf raping a woman (though this remains unknown to the woman and her husband) struggles against the demons of his genetic makeup. As a teenager he sees flesh all around him, and he is aroused violently and sexually by it.

There's a certain equation here of sexual freedom with violence and loss of control. The novel can be understood as an indictment of civilization, but it could easily be flipped on its head and interpreted as a conservative horror story the same way Friday the 13th or other 1980s slasher films seem to be telling us that the wicked, and more importantly the wicked children, will be punished for their licentiousness.

Levy’s prose is clean and unadorned, with the welcome exception of some of his descriptions of his rural southern landscape, making The Beast Within an entertaining modern werewolf tale.

The Nightwalker by Thomas Tessier (1979)

Today's post will take the form of a discussion. We hope you enjoy.

Mark: OK, starting things off here . . .

Let me ask you, did you find the protagonist in The Nightwalker to be at all likeable? Because I think this is one thing that kept me from enjoying this book more--although I did like it.

When he first starts changing and hurting random people, he seems conflicted and upset about it, but there were times that he really just sorta rolled with it and overall came off as kind of a bastard. But then, I found that somewhat intriguing at the same time. I guess I still haven't made up my mind how I feel about this character. I did sometimes wish there was more of a protagonist, someone else to follow besides this guy exclusively.

So, did he actually change into a wolf or not? It's left fairly open, just like in Werewolf of Paris. I don't know if I like that or not--though I do like the descriptions, the brief descriptions, we get when he confronts a few of the folks towards the end, the stuff about his hands being gnarled and his walking strange. I don't feel that he turned into an actual huge hairy beast, though.

Michael: To answer your first question - no, I didn't find Bobby Ives especially likeable. I also found it striking that he did not express any sort of remorse for the senseless slayings of the people he was closest to. Especially, the first girl, Annie, who seems to be really quite normal and healthy. He doesn't dwell too long on whether he murdered her, and he doesn't express any real emotion, any sense of missing her. But I think Tessier tries to explain this with one of the Vietnam stories that Ives tells, the one where he kills the prostitute who has just impaled a soldier. I think we're supposed to understand that Bobby has been really desensitized to this type of violence. So, while Ives is not likeable, I think he is, at least, interesting and complex.

I liked the fact that Tessier didn't resort to too many overt werewolf cliches. We get the sense of Ives's metamorphosis, the way he turns into a lethal pretador. I don't want to see a huge hairy beast in this setting. I think it would take away from the reality of the text.

On that note, I'd like to bring up Miss Tanith. I was really worried when Ives started looking for a psychic to tell him what the hell was going on. This is a device that is used in too many horror novels. I don't want a hokey gypsy psychic to be the portal to the realm of the supernatural. But I thought Tessier handled this really well. Miss Tanith is very subtle in her reading of Ives's problem. She doesn't spout any mystical mumbo jumbo, just does her job like a professional. She helps Ives in a practical way, by locking him in the room and adjusting his diet and lifestyle. It would have totally ruined the novel for me if she did some sort of exorcism or other ritual.

Mark: Oh, I definitely agree on that count. Miss Tanith was very well-done. Not overused, and staying away from genre cliches as much as possible. I enjoyed the bit with Ives locked in the room, and also found it interesting that he didn't kill her at the end.

I liked this book, and I think Tessier could be an author worth checking out. The novella that came with edition I got was very good; I actually enjoyed it a little more than Nightwalker.

Anyway, I liked this book for the most part. The "stalking" scenes were particularly excited; he has a talent for writing action/suspense scenes.

Michael: Another thing I thought was really interesting was how Tessier brought the whole punk culture into the ending, after Ives meets Angel. He doesn't glamorize it or dismiss it as a disposal youth movement. I think he gives Ives exactly the right reaction at the basement punk show. This guy is more oriented to the Allman Brothers than punk rock, but he's got anger inside of him, so something about the aggression and sheer power of the music and the manic singer really gets to him. You don't get many believable descriptions of punk shows in fiction.

However, I think Tessier could have spent a lot more time on creating a rich and detailed portrait of London. I'm thinking he cut this book down to its barest bones, taking out anything that seemed unnecessary. But I would have loved to see more of Ives running around the city, getting into his head a bit more about how he feels about people. Being a Vietnam vet he's probably got some interesting views on everyday life, on the silly mundane things people do in a peaceful city. I'm thinking of some of those scenes in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle is just looking at people. I want Ives to look at people more, to be more introspective and express some of his thoughts.

Mark: Yeah, the section with the punk shows was done very well. I liked that character, Angel. I kind of wish there was a bit more of her in the story.

Michael: Another thing I'd like to discuss, is Ives eating habits. I know this may seem like a strange line of criticism for a book (I'll call it dietism), but I think it's important. Ives eats nothing but honey and ginseng supplements and a vitamin here or there, and I think maybe he eats a hamburger soon after Annie dies.

I was really wondering what Tessier was getting at with this. I would have completely let it go if Ives only ate his honey and ginseng once or twice, but it comes up in almost every chapter. It reminded me a bit of this theme that runs through Marc Brandel's The Hand where the main character's wife gets into all this silly dieting and meditation to try to deal with the problems of her marriage, instead of confronting the real problem. Maybe Ives is trying to suppress his appetite for flesh by eating such a strange, bird-like diet. But I think in reality it probably serves to make him even more blood thirsty. I know I'd be ready to eat some joggers if I only ate honey all day long.

Mark: Yeah, that was very odd, and you're right, never fully explained. I immediately thought of a bear, how you figure bears like honey, but never gave it much consideration beyond that. It just seemed kind of, I don't know, animal-like?

Michael: Yeah. Maybe he was a werebear, not a werewolf. Werebear doesn't sound very scary though. It, in fact, sounds less scary than a plain old bear.

Another thing that's pretty striking in this novel is Tessier use of trashy sex descriptions, bordering on erotica, especially in some of the first scenes with Angel. Some of this was just a little too over the top for me. Not that any of it was too explicit, but I just thought that it came out of nowhere. Ives seemed like a normally sexually repressed dude who wouldn't have the nerve to screw with a woman the way he does with Angel. Is this the werewolf coming out? If so, it's an interesting concept. I don't know too many werewolf stories where the monster sexually ravishes his victims. Maybe it's a part of the legend that is generally neglected. Can you think of any films or books in which the werewolf is a sexual predator, as a well a predator predator?

Mark: Werebear may not sound that scary, but it DOES sound awesome.

The Howling. I don't recall exactly how the book differs from the movie, but I believe this would be one case.

Also, even though not technically a werewolf, when Dracula is in beast form and sexually assaults . . . Mina? Lucy? I can't remember which it is.

Check out this overview of Tessier's career.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King’s 1981 nonfiction examination of horror fiction in literature, film, television and radio, he names Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as the prototypical werewolf tale. Whereas his choices for the other two major horror formulas are uncontroversial – Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein for The Thing Without a Name, and Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula for the vampire – Strange Case seems an odd pick for the piece that set the mold for all future werewolf stories, considering that we don’t find a typical werewolf in the novella at all. And it’s not as if Stevenson doesn’t have predecessors who used a more recognizable werewolf, an honest-to-god lycanthrope, in their fiction. Going back all the way to Petronius’s Satyricon from the late first century CE, we see evidence of folk tales involving men who morph into humanoid wolves and terrorize the countryside. These figures show up in a few medieval texts, but don’t become a staple of horror literature until the mid-nineteenth century with George W.M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Werewolf (1848), Alexander Dumas’s The Wolf-Leader (1857), and Erckmann-Chatrian’s story “The Man Wolf” (1859), which all contributed to the werewolf legend’s decidedly middle European feel. Really the cliché Hollywood werewolf was pretty much set in stone at this point. Just substitute foggy English moors for a stormy Black Forest and you’ve got a very recognizable piece of horror fiction. Even in Wagner the Werewolf our villain is unwillingly terrifying young women.

Now, I don’t know if I agree with King’s choice of Strange Case as the prototypical werewolf story, but I do agree with skipping over Wagner for this honor. Though Wagner might express all the necessary tropes of a werewolf story, it is practically unreadable. Strange Case remains an entertaining, and evocative exploration of the irresistible lure of the lowly and vile, and while Mr Hyde doesn’t howl at the moon, Strange Case certainly exhibits the key traits of a werewolf tale long before this archetype was codified. Dr Jekyll is a handsome, successful, almost overly optimistic and jovial character, who enjoys the peaceful company of his friends. He shows himself to be preternaturally good. So when he falls from grace, when he dabbles too far into quack science, the contrast with his alter-ego, his “werewolf” of sorts, is made all the more terrifying. This contrast must be present for a truly successful werewolf tale. It’s what separates the vampire from the werewolf, and makes the latter a much more introspective horror story, where the reader puts him or herself in the villain’s shoes. Where Strange Case diverges from the ideal werewolf tale, is that Jekyll, when transformed into Mr Hyde, is not drawn specifically to the people closest to him, he never attacks his friends or family. However, this might be explained by Jekyll’s self-imposed isolation, which plays a very important role in the novella. In this respect, I’d propose Guy Endore’s 1933 masterpiece, Werewolf of Paris, as the purest werewolf tale, but we’ll leave that discussion to a future post.



The power of Stevenson’s most popular piece of horror fiction lies with his understanding of two extremely important aspects of genre storytelling, or for that matter storytelling of any kind. You must have a compelling story to tell, of course, but without strong and resonant settings and interesting, believable perspectives, any form of fiction falls flat. Too many horror writers sacrifice these two elements for the gimmicks of gore, plot twists and a preoccupation with trends in the genre. In Strange Case, Stevenson created a dark and foggy London, one that traces its literary lineage directly through William Blake. It’s striking that Blake could conjure such a rich picture of a place in sixteen lines (“London” 1797), something many novelists can’t do in 100,000 words. Stevenson manages, however, to create a brutal, unforgiving picture of London with its decaying alleys and mansions. Everything is imbued, here, with a sense of dissolution and death. Utterson and all his friends, including Jekyll, seem on the brink of oblivion, seem to be about to disappear into their gray surroundings.

Another important aspect of Strange Case, which Stevenson skillfully employs, is perspective. So many contemporary novelists confine themselves to a bland third person omniscience, or lifeless first person, in a futile and counteractive attempt to make their fiction “objective”. What Stevenson understood, and what I think all great novelists understand, is that there is no such thing as an “objective” narrative. Even something as objective as a movie camera is manipulated in such a way to provide a unique, subjective perspective to the audience. Stevenson uses many different perspectives to reveal a tale of decay and distrust, in a powerful way that could never be achieved through a straight third person narration. Utterson, a close friend of Jekyll, unfolds the action for us, and it is his compassion for Jekyll that makes his transformation into Mr Hyde all the more terrifying. We respect Jekyll because Utterson does, and we feel revulsion towards Hyde because Utterson does. The final passage of the novella is presented as Jekyll’s own words from a letter he’s written accounting for all the strange events surrounding him. This confession is a riveting psychological portrait and brings yet another fully formed perspective to add a depth to Strange Case that is remarkable for such a short book.

If you’ve only experienced the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde through adaptations, do yourself a favor and read the original.



Check out this free audio book of Strange Case at LibriVox.