Monsters = the best escapist entertainment ever
(I want an old-school icon of Larry Talbot from the original Wolf Man. This will probably entail my developing icon skills at last, but I am resigned.)
I just checked out Guy Endore's Werewolf of Paris from the school library. Despite sounding like a Jules Verne-vintage translation from the French, it was written in English in the 1930s. It looks to be very grim and disturbing; I'm on page 100* and there hasn't been a likable character yet, and the author is happily putting all his kinks into the narrative in a way I find exploitative even in fanfiction. Despite this, I'm still going to finish it, because I'm so eager for a werewolf book.
The thing about werewolves is, they don't really have a Victorian ur-text. So much other horror primarily known to us from the movies can be traced back to a nineteenth-century novel. Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, I think Mad Love, and lots of rip-offs/homages/careful adaptations of Poe--all have become best-known because of their films, and when someone loves the movie you can say, "Here's the book! It's awesome in the same, and yet different ways!" (I know Frankenstein is a Georgian ur-text, not Victorian, but lazy thinkers all over the world, such as myself sometimes, tend to act as though Queen Victoria reigned for a hundred years, from 1800 to 1900.)
Poor old werewolves, though; they're the red-headed stepchild of the monster family. With other creatures, you can point to a literary origin and see where the present character is the same and where he/she is interestingly different. It's like the way that writers of detective stories have to at least know about the Holmes stories. Love them (I do!) or hate them, you can learn a lot from them, and they've made such a cultural impact that you can't pretend they never happened. Even so with horror characters. A vampire character in the modern day has, not just folklore, but the monolithic work of vampdom that is Dracula behind him, defining concepts and rules that your new Joe Vampire must choose whether to abide by or ignore.
You know the story where Holmes sneers at Auguste Dupin? There was a passage like that in The Vampire Lestat. In it, Lestat praises Lord Ruthven and Carmilla, for whom he apparently has a lot of admiration. Then he sneers at Dracula, "the great ape of the vampires, who despite being able to turn into a bat, a wolf, or fog is given to clambering about on the sheer rock walls of his castle." I always felt that was very ungrateful indeed of Lestat, who wouldn't have been written with the concept of disturbing-mutual-blood-exchange transformation if Stoker hadn't written it first. Oh, well, the whirligig of time brings in his revenges: Anne Rice's vampire novels are so last decade, while plenty of people are still reading Stoker today. Which is not to say that I dislike Rice's stuff, either. Whenever Stephanie Meyer comes up in conversation, I usually exclaim, "Back in my day, our transgressive vampires came from Anne Rice, and we were glad to get them, by God!" I have fond memories of sitting in the old wardrobe on a pile of feather mattresses, aged about twelve, avidly reading the novel about hot omnisexual vampires that I had hidden away on a top shelf. I thought Rice was great literature, because her books were for sale everywhere you went. Hey, she's popular, she must be a worthy writer, mustn't she? If she wasn't, people wouldn't like her. Yeah. I thought I was so transgressive. No, more than that: I thought I was sophisticated.
Anyway, this is me working up to saying that I bought the novelization of The Wolfman, because I was longing that much for lycanthropy to have a Victorian novel in its mythos. *blushes* I'm not ashamed. I am a woman who has watched House of Frankenstein. Georgy-from-the-video-store loaned it to me, and I LIKED IT, I tell you. After that, slumming it by reading a... a novelization... is very small potatoes. Well, I was pleasantly surprised by how much stuff it got right. The author--well, I want to leave this post public, so I'm not naming him on here in case he likes to vanity-google. If he stumbles across it regardless, 'tis his own bad luck. Anyhow, I am mostly here to praise him, not to bury him. He does a very good job (for a modern American writer) of keeping up a late-nineteenth-century novelistic turn of phrase, and couching all the melodrama in shilling-shocker language. (Then he has to go and spoil the effect with occasional neologisms such as "[character] was fine with that.") He's done his research, too--culture, food, drink, clothes, guns, books--and you can see how proud he is. One cute touch was that a character accused of murder says, "While you're at it you might want to establish my whereabouts on September twenty-eight of this year. Perhaps Herman Melville's death was no accident. Could have been me." It translated the movie pretty well into literary terms.
The nicest thing about it was, it managed to say a few things about werewolfism that didn't make it into the movie. The heavy villain (also a werewolf, of course) gets to ramble on a good bit more, and the writer has given him lines that tie in with real life in a surprising way. He talks about the survival of the fittest, and invokes the ghastly pseudo-Darwinism that people in the eugenics movement spouted. (You'll notice that whenever someone tries to alter the human race, they're trying to make humanity more like themselves. This is just one of the many reasons it's not credible. You'll never catch someone in the eugenics movement saying, "You know, the hardy and intelligent peoples of the XYZ Delta on the other side of the continent are genetically superior to ourselves, humanity should be more like XYZians and less like us.") "If we accept evolution as a truth," says the villain, "then she is of the kind we should be breeding so that we move farther and farther from the savagery of our ancestors... It may be that we don't yet deserve it."
More usefully to the concept of lycanthropy, though, he gushes about how wonderful it is to be a werewolf. In addition to all the stuff from the movie ("Let the beast run free. Kill or be killed."), we get a lot of happy rambling from someone who's enjoying every minute of his curse. Including the assertion that wolves kill their unfit young. "It's purity, really. Untroubled by conscience. Oh God... to be free of it. Sweet animal oblivion."
And so on. Okay, even without looking on Wikipedia, I'm pretty sure that wolves do not kill off their weak cubs. From all I've heard, actual wolves make good fathers. But this throws some light on an idea I'd never quite realized before. This is it:
Werewolves aren't actual wolves. They're what humans think wolves are like.
Among things that "everyone knows" about werewolves (at least in horror), we can list the following:
--They hunger for human flesh
--They will always seek out human prey in preference to animal prey (the latest movie has a beautiful example, with a werewolf that passes up an elk to go slaughter humans)
--They're permanently hostile and will fight at the least provocation
--They can escape from anything and anywhere (pit trap, chair restraints, police blockade, mad scientists' lab)
--Two or more werewolves form a pack, based on violent dominance and submission to an "alpha", the strongest and most vicious male
--They have no endearing canine habits such as enjoying being petted, chasing sticks, or sleeping curled into a ball
Thanks in part to TV Tropes's excellent article ("Our Werewolves Are Different"; look it up if you want to lose two hours in a fascinated trance), I've been thinking a little more about this. The cultural concept of the werewolf is wildly inconsistent if you expect it to jibe with what we know of real wolves. Just for one thing, I'm told that real wolves' packs aren't just random groups of wolves who bite and bully one another to establish a ranking system. They're families, with the daddy and mommy wolves as alpha and beta, and their children as the rest of the pack. (Of course, that idea just provides more options for creepy werewolf dynamics, but I digress.)
But! Everything about werewolves makes sense if you consider that they're based on what humans think wolves are. To humans, wolves are the big, gaunt, hungry animals leaping up at the back of the troika to try and pull someone off and eat him. They are the things that will run you down when you're alone in the forest, and maybe no one will ever find your bones. They are out to get you. They're like sharks, only worse. They have strangely human eyes and sometimes you feel that they could speak to you if they wanted to. That's a disturbing feeling coming from something that could kill you with only moderate difficulty. They're even handsome in their strength. But they are not your friend. They will do you mischief in the wood.
Of course, I like "different" werewolves a great deal. Angua and Ludmilla from the Discworld books come instantly to mind. There was a book of stories just called Werewolves in the library which I loved when I was a kid. I believe it was one of those Greenberg/Waugh anthologies that came out a lot in the early nineties. The cover had a beautiful illustration of a youth wearing a gray fur robe, and gasping in surprise as it grows fast to him and makes him into a wolf. Now I want to get that book out again; it's been so long since I read it that the stories will come as a surprise. It had plenty of heroic or funny werewolf characters, too. But I guess I'm just saying that the whole movie-werewolf concept makes a lot more sense to me now.
*Edited to add: I've read a little further. Unfortunately we're stuck with a story that consists of victims, villains, and weak-willed stinkers who are both from time to time. The viewpoint character, Aymer, is one of the latter. He's having a guilty affair with the poor serving woman who (already) has the little boy who grows up to be the werewolf. Aymer acts as a surrogate father--with all that the word "father" implies in the depressing sort of family melodrama. He goes into deep denial over the werewolf youth, Bertrand, considers killing him for his own, uh, good, and beats the crap out of him for a psychotic act that Bertrand was powerless to prevent himself committing. I hope something nasty will happen to him, but I've the sad feeling that it won't; the author seems to consider him to be something other than repellent. On the other hand, I think I've just reached the good part of the book. Bertrand is growing up to be a poor confused guy with scared eyes, and I'm a real pushover for woobies like that.
I just checked out Guy Endore's Werewolf of Paris from the school library. Despite sounding like a Jules Verne-vintage translation from the French, it was written in English in the 1930s. It looks to be very grim and disturbing; I'm on page 100* and there hasn't been a likable character yet, and the author is happily putting all his kinks into the narrative in a way I find exploitative even in fanfiction. Despite this, I'm still going to finish it, because I'm so eager for a werewolf book.
The thing about werewolves is, they don't really have a Victorian ur-text. So much other horror primarily known to us from the movies can be traced back to a nineteenth-century novel. Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, I think Mad Love, and lots of rip-offs/homages/careful adaptations of Poe--all have become best-known because of their films, and when someone loves the movie you can say, "Here's the book! It's awesome in the same, and yet different ways!" (I know Frankenstein is a Georgian ur-text, not Victorian, but lazy thinkers all over the world, such as myself sometimes, tend to act as though Queen Victoria reigned for a hundred years, from 1800 to 1900.)
Poor old werewolves, though; they're the red-headed stepchild of the monster family. With other creatures, you can point to a literary origin and see where the present character is the same and where he/she is interestingly different. It's like the way that writers of detective stories have to at least know about the Holmes stories. Love them (I do!) or hate them, you can learn a lot from them, and they've made such a cultural impact that you can't pretend they never happened. Even so with horror characters. A vampire character in the modern day has, not just folklore, but the monolithic work of vampdom that is Dracula behind him, defining concepts and rules that your new Joe Vampire must choose whether to abide by or ignore.
You know the story where Holmes sneers at Auguste Dupin? There was a passage like that in The Vampire Lestat. In it, Lestat praises Lord Ruthven and Carmilla, for whom he apparently has a lot of admiration. Then he sneers at Dracula, "the great ape of the vampires, who despite being able to turn into a bat, a wolf, or fog is given to clambering about on the sheer rock walls of his castle." I always felt that was very ungrateful indeed of Lestat, who wouldn't have been written with the concept of disturbing-mutual-blood-exchange transformation if Stoker hadn't written it first. Oh, well, the whirligig of time brings in his revenges: Anne Rice's vampire novels are so last decade, while plenty of people are still reading Stoker today. Which is not to say that I dislike Rice's stuff, either. Whenever Stephanie Meyer comes up in conversation, I usually exclaim, "Back in my day, our transgressive vampires came from Anne Rice, and we were glad to get them, by God!" I have fond memories of sitting in the old wardrobe on a pile of feather mattresses, aged about twelve, avidly reading the novel about hot omnisexual vampires that I had hidden away on a top shelf. I thought Rice was great literature, because her books were for sale everywhere you went. Hey, she's popular, she must be a worthy writer, mustn't she? If she wasn't, people wouldn't like her. Yeah. I thought I was so transgressive. No, more than that: I thought I was sophisticated.
Anyway, this is me working up to saying that I bought the novelization of The Wolfman, because I was longing that much for lycanthropy to have a Victorian novel in its mythos. *blushes* I'm not ashamed. I am a woman who has watched House of Frankenstein. Georgy-from-the-video-store loaned it to me, and I LIKED IT, I tell you. After that, slumming it by reading a... a novelization... is very small potatoes. Well, I was pleasantly surprised by how much stuff it got right. The author--well, I want to leave this post public, so I'm not naming him on here in case he likes to vanity-google. If he stumbles across it regardless, 'tis his own bad luck. Anyhow, I am mostly here to praise him, not to bury him. He does a very good job (for a modern American writer) of keeping up a late-nineteenth-century novelistic turn of phrase, and couching all the melodrama in shilling-shocker language. (Then he has to go and spoil the effect with occasional neologisms such as "[character] was fine with that.") He's done his research, too--culture, food, drink, clothes, guns, books--and you can see how proud he is. One cute touch was that a character accused of murder says, "While you're at it you might want to establish my whereabouts on September twenty-eight of this year. Perhaps Herman Melville's death was no accident. Could have been me." It translated the movie pretty well into literary terms.
The nicest thing about it was, it managed to say a few things about werewolfism that didn't make it into the movie. The heavy villain (also a werewolf, of course) gets to ramble on a good bit more, and the writer has given him lines that tie in with real life in a surprising way. He talks about the survival of the fittest, and invokes the ghastly pseudo-Darwinism that people in the eugenics movement spouted. (You'll notice that whenever someone tries to alter the human race, they're trying to make humanity more like themselves. This is just one of the many reasons it's not credible. You'll never catch someone in the eugenics movement saying, "You know, the hardy and intelligent peoples of the XYZ Delta on the other side of the continent are genetically superior to ourselves, humanity should be more like XYZians and less like us.") "If we accept evolution as a truth," says the villain, "then she is of the kind we should be breeding so that we move farther and farther from the savagery of our ancestors... It may be that we don't yet deserve it."
More usefully to the concept of lycanthropy, though, he gushes about how wonderful it is to be a werewolf. In addition to all the stuff from the movie ("Let the beast run free. Kill or be killed."), we get a lot of happy rambling from someone who's enjoying every minute of his curse. Including the assertion that wolves kill their unfit young. "It's purity, really. Untroubled by conscience. Oh God... to be free of it. Sweet animal oblivion."
And so on. Okay, even without looking on Wikipedia, I'm pretty sure that wolves do not kill off their weak cubs. From all I've heard, actual wolves make good fathers. But this throws some light on an idea I'd never quite realized before. This is it:
Werewolves aren't actual wolves. They're what humans think wolves are like.
Among things that "everyone knows" about werewolves (at least in horror), we can list the following:
--They hunger for human flesh
--They will always seek out human prey in preference to animal prey (the latest movie has a beautiful example, with a werewolf that passes up an elk to go slaughter humans)
--They're permanently hostile and will fight at the least provocation
--They can escape from anything and anywhere (pit trap, chair restraints, police blockade, mad scientists' lab)
--Two or more werewolves form a pack, based on violent dominance and submission to an "alpha", the strongest and most vicious male
--They have no endearing canine habits such as enjoying being petted, chasing sticks, or sleeping curled into a ball
Thanks in part to TV Tropes's excellent article ("Our Werewolves Are Different"; look it up if you want to lose two hours in a fascinated trance), I've been thinking a little more about this. The cultural concept of the werewolf is wildly inconsistent if you expect it to jibe with what we know of real wolves. Just for one thing, I'm told that real wolves' packs aren't just random groups of wolves who bite and bully one another to establish a ranking system. They're families, with the daddy and mommy wolves as alpha and beta, and their children as the rest of the pack. (Of course, that idea just provides more options for creepy werewolf dynamics, but I digress.)
But! Everything about werewolves makes sense if you consider that they're based on what humans think wolves are. To humans, wolves are the big, gaunt, hungry animals leaping up at the back of the troika to try and pull someone off and eat him. They are the things that will run you down when you're alone in the forest, and maybe no one will ever find your bones. They are out to get you. They're like sharks, only worse. They have strangely human eyes and sometimes you feel that they could speak to you if they wanted to. That's a disturbing feeling coming from something that could kill you with only moderate difficulty. They're even handsome in their strength. But they are not your friend. They will do you mischief in the wood.
Of course, I like "different" werewolves a great deal. Angua and Ludmilla from the Discworld books come instantly to mind. There was a book of stories just called Werewolves in the library which I loved when I was a kid. I believe it was one of those Greenberg/Waugh anthologies that came out a lot in the early nineties. The cover had a beautiful illustration of a youth wearing a gray fur robe, and gasping in surprise as it grows fast to him and makes him into a wolf. Now I want to get that book out again; it's been so long since I read it that the stories will come as a surprise. It had plenty of heroic or funny werewolf characters, too. But I guess I'm just saying that the whole movie-werewolf concept makes a lot more sense to me now.
*Edited to add: I've read a little further. Unfortunately we're stuck with a story that consists of victims, villains, and weak-willed stinkers who are both from time to time. The viewpoint character, Aymer, is one of the latter. He's having a guilty affair with the poor serving woman who (already) has the little boy who grows up to be the werewolf. Aymer acts as a surrogate father--with all that the word "father" implies in the depressing sort of family melodrama. He goes into deep denial over the werewolf youth, Bertrand, considers killing him for his own, uh, good, and beats the crap out of him for a psychotic act that Bertrand was powerless to prevent himself committing. I hope something nasty will happen to him, but I've the sad feeling that it won't; the author seems to consider him to be something other than repellent. On the other hand, I think I've just reached the good part of the book. Bertrand is growing up to be a poor confused guy with scared eyes, and I'm a real pushover for woobies like that.