Books 19-20
Werewolf by Night: New Wolf Rising by Taboo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Werewolf by Night
I’m always a little leery of using werewolves and Native Americans as some tribes hold them to be an evil (the skin walkers) . Taboo’s wiki says he has Shoshone and Mexican heritage but he didn’t entirely use that in this story. The protagonist is Mexican and Hopi, one of the tribes who have the Skinwalker belief. I’ll circle back to this.
I’ll be honest I don’t remember Werewolf by Night well from my childhood. I’m pretty sure I got it back in the 70s. I had several of those Supernatural orientated comic books back then but the two I remember best are Ghost Rider and Mobius, so I can’t say how close (or not) Taboo’s reboot of this story is to the original. Maybe that played a role in this.
Jake is a teenaged boy who is the titular werewolf by night. His girlfriend has found a way to help calm him and return him to human using music. He is content to prowl the reservation and keep it safe, especially his grandma. Multiple Native Americans have disappeared in recent months but Jake has no clue as to where/how.
It opens with your typical biker rednecks causing troubles but it also brings Jake to the attention of people who don’t have his interest in mind and some who do, namely Red Wolf and JJ. He’s another Native American who’s traveled in time and JJ, she’s more a super agent type. They want to help Jake once they learn more about him. Together they want to stop the people kidnapping and turning others into monsters.
As far as stories go, it’s engaging enough but really it doesn’t have that much of a Native American feel. I never got the sense that anyone did much to look into the culture of the tribes in that area (Hopi, Navajo, Ute etc.) and that seemed like a wasted opportunity. Red Wolf feels like a far too generic ‘mysterious Native’ stereotype. I just wanted more from this.
The art on the other hand is fantastic. I really liked it barring the cover art. Not that it was bad per se but go ahead stand like they have Jake on the cover. That is not a natural way to stand and why does Werewolf Jake look like he has four leg joints instead of three?
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A Summoning of Souls by Leanna Renee Hieber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A Summoning of Spirits finishes off the Spectral City trilogy (though not necessarily these characters who really seem to have a lot more story to tell.) Needless to say this one isn’t really a stand alone type of series and this picks up almost immediately after the proceeding book.
Eve, Jacob and their team both living and dead, have to stop Prenze who has made it his mission to rid NYC of ghosts. He is actively ‘haunting’ Eve and her family with his astral projection and has designs on Eve and her paranormal abilities to help him reach his goal.
Like the other books it definitely has that gothic horror feel in both plot and writing style. Prenze is an interesting villain, certainly not a sympathetic one but you can see how he was created. Eve tries to pull the cutting everyone off to ‘save’ them from the villain thing, one of my least favorite tropes but this one gets stood on its head by the reactions of literally everyone else so I enjoyed that.
There is definitely a lot of slow burn romance in this book and for fans of the fake dating trope you’ll be well fed here. It’s hard to review the end of a trilogy without spoiling things so I think I’ll leave it with there is a lot of found family stuff in this and the plot wraps up very well and what more can you ask for?
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