Cycle of the Werewolf (Stephen King)

This short book was pretty cool, and I am glad we got to read something by Stephen King. Right off the bat, I liked the title. The story is about a werewolf and it starts at the beginning of a year. It runs through the cycle of months, Jan-Dec. Add to that the fact that the antagonist changes into a werewolf during the full moon (like all werewolves do), and you have another cycle. Though we only see one cycle of a year in the story, its still part of a cycle. Twelve cycles of the moon and one cycle of the year. I find themes that have multiple tie-ins like that interesting.

The story itself started off real slow. We got a victim, we got the werewolf, we got a killing. Repeat. Each time was a different person, different family. It wasn't until about May or June when we finally received pieces that really tied in to other pieces enough that we could extrapolate a story out of it. I was beginning to get worried that it was just going be twelve very loosely related killings. But the second half of the book was much better. Once Marty put the werewolf's eye out with the firecracker, we finally had a real story. Marty survived. And he knew the whoever the werewolf was only had one eye. At that point, I started enjoying the story. The Halloween discovery, the letters, the righteous priest coming to grips with the fact that he was the werewolf, and then trying to justify it. It became a decent story at that point. Surprisingly, the ending did not have much of a surprise to it. Uncle Al made the silver bullets, Marty shot the werewolf. All just like the reader figured it might. I was a little disappointed with that. I'd like to have seen one last surprise by Mr. King, some twist I hadn't thought of. Perhaps if Marty's sister was the one who had the crush on the reverend, instead of the barmaid Elise who sang in the choir, and then at the end, Marty sees a bit of wolf fur under his sister's door or something. I don't know, just something that would have made me say "Woah!" And whatever happened to Elise? She didn't even reappear in the story. That bit of info on her having a crush on Lowe was a bit of a Chekhov's gun.

I would have liked to have see a little bit more about the monster itself. When Lowe had the dream about the werewolf, it was King giving the reader the hint that he was the werewolf. It was pretty heavy-handed. And that's okay, but if he was ready to let us figure that out so early, then why not let us then really jump into Lowe's character, and the werewolf, even more. Give us cravings. Give us explanation of how he came to be a werewolf. Give us more reason to understand beyond any doubt that he is the werewolf, and not just rely on the missing eye. I'd like to have seen wolfish features. Cravings for meat. Maybe a pack mentality with other church members. As it was, the werewolf was just a simple werewolf. And Lowe was a typical man who turned into a werewolf and didn't know it at first but figured it out. This was were I found the story lacking. Perhaps it was just because there was an implied limit on story length, given how this story was written with the illustrator. I don't know. But I could have used more monster. My favorite part was when Lowe felt the "strange, trapped feeling... the way he imagines a fox must feel when it realizes that the dogs have somehow chased it into a cul-de-sac." That was Lowe fully accepting what he was, and thinking like the monster. I wanted more of that.

Given its short length, this book is definitely worth the read. But I think anyone expecting King at his finest would be let down.

Rawhead Rex (Clive Barker)

Wow. What the heck did I just read?

Let me start of by saying that this was my favorite read in this class so far. I know there were sub-themes and some things probably represented other things... lots of it about religion. Whatever. This story was just straight up nasty. I think it's the first story in our Monster class that actually featured a monster.

Rawhead Rex was an amazing monster. Bad ass. Scary. Gory. All of it. I've never read anything from Barker before, but I'm gonna have to read some more of his stuff. I love that he gave us glimpses of the story from Rawhead's POV. I loved that he showed us, through that POV, the monster's fears and weaknesses. And Barker killed it with the descriptions of Rawhead through the other POVs. We didn't get it all at once, but certain things, like Rawhead's teeth, were brought up several times, each time cementing the image of his mouth.. impossibly big... getting bigger... with those two rows of teeth. Loved it. This is the kind of antagonist I want to put in my fantasy writing. A creation that the reader gets to know through internal POV, yet still fears the unknown (and even known) aspects of him when he's rampaging. I was very impressed with this monster, and doubly so how effective Barker was of engaging me with it.

Barker's in-your-face way of writing this story was interesting. Nothing was held back and anything was on the table. Chow down a kid? Check. Piss on a newly recruited follower as a baptism? Check. Jack off into a fire? Check. Rip of a dude's junk? Check. Thirst for newborn babies? Check. Rape women to create hybrid offspring? Check. Like this bad guy was B-A-D bad. But every now and then, you got to see inside his head, and Barker gave him connections to the reader. His loneliness at being buried alive. His fear of the stone from the altar. The way he learned from his surroundings... the petrol "blood" of the boxes, the realization that the bullets were hurting him and he had to run. He was as an arrogant god, yet we got to feel his fear. I thought this was all so very well done.

I want more stories like this. It was a master class in monster creation. Bravo, Mr. Barker!

On the down side, I did have a little trouble with the POV hopping. Don't get me wrong. I wanted the POVs we got (especially from Rawhead himself). But this was one area that I think Barker could have done a little cleaner. Just the inclusion of some kind of typed marker--three asterisks or something--would have made the overall reading smoother for me, because I'd go from one paragraph to another and be momentarily stunned or distracted, trying to figure out what the heck was going on. It got a little easier once I realized Barker was going to jump around from person to person, but I just would have liked a little more understanding earlier on what was happening, and better clues that it was happening. But what I DID learn from this was that, as a reader, I liked getting the different POVs, and that is something that was important to me, as my thesis is being written from five POVs. As I'm writing it now, each chapter is from a different POV. I thought that mixing POVs within a chapter wouldn't work. But Barker showed me that it can. I think what he did can be improved upon, as I noted earlier, but that doesn't mean it can't work as a method. And it makes me want to experiment with that technique in my thesis. For a short story read in a RiG, that's about as successful an assignment as you can get.

And it wasn't even the best part. I want to write a monster like Rawhead Rex. Something to be feared, and yet related to, at least on some scale. These kinds of examples are priceless.

Breeding Ground (Sarah Pinborough)

I had mixed feelings about this book.

The creepiness and overall tension was done excellently. Pinborough is very vivid with the downfall of the women, especially Chloe. It started with the unexplained fatness, even though she hadn't eaten in a week. Then it increased to the bulges on her body moving under the skin. When she stocked the fridge with liver and other animal organs, it was getting pretty creepy. Then when she ate it, Pinborough really captured the disgust of it so well. As the grotesqueness of the story strengthened, so too did the tension. You knew something was wrong, but you didn't know just what. First person POV was perfect for this book because we only got to know things as Matt did. And he didn't know shit. When the fetus hit the floor, you pretty much knew anything was in bounds for Pinborough.

The aliens, or whatever they were, were done extremely well. Their description was built over time, getting just a few bits every now and then, teasing the reader, until you had a good understanding of them. One complaint I had though was not having a much better picture of them (what they can do and where they came from) by the end of the book. But I'll talk about that later. The widows were excellent monsters: giant translucent spidery creatures with banks of red eyes, telepathic powers, disease inducing bites, and who knows what else. They reminded me a little bit of the aliens from Aliens, the movie. Maybe they are easier to kill, but I think they are going to prove to be a bit more cunning, which makes them potentially that much worse. We know very little about the black male widows, and that's a shame. I know there is a second book, but the first book needs to answer some things. But I really liked these monsters, and Pinborough did an excellent job in describing them, and their by-products. The gooey translucent spider webs were an awesome touch to the creepiness factor, and the same kind of translucent goo that came out of people over time after bitten was also way cool. An excellent monster, to be sure.

I did have some issues with the book though. For one, Matt was a tool. I wanted to like him, but he just wasn't someone I could sympathize with. The big turn off for me was how he claimed to be so in love with Chloe, and really, kinda proved it at the beginning of the book. I bought that he was a good guy. But after Chloe died, he was banging Katie like three days later. He blamed it on how the world had turned upside down or whatever, but I'm sorry, that excuse rings hollow. I don't know that it was all on Matt either. I think Pinborough herself let me down there. Matt is inconsistent. At least from what I could tell. He was not the same nice guy who started the book. I don't think his change was natural, and I don't think it could be blamed on the catastrophe that happened. People's true colors come out when the hard times hit, and I don't think Matt's true colors were in the ballpark of some kind of lustful playboy. There were three women of age in this book, and he had all three of them. I didn't think that was his character, especially given the short time line between them all. I was very disappointed with this aspect of the book because it made me not trust him across the board.

While I'm talking about Matt and the women, I was also really surprised at a rated X scene in the middle of this rated R novel. Not like offended or anything, but, was the full blown description of sex with Katie really necessary? It got pretty darned detailed, and I'm not sure what it added to the story. That part had me scratching my head.

I had a few logic problems. Why did the dog go to their protected base? How did it know to go there? How did it know humans were there? Why did it sit in front of that gate for so long? I thought maybe the widows were somehow controlling it, but no. It just happened to travel all those miles to wait in front of a gate with no humans around that it could know of. Didn't make sense.

I didn't believe Rebecca would have ran in front of Nigel to protect him from a mercy killing so he could suffer dying via his widow-inflicted wounds. I'm personally glad that he did die that way, but I don't believe it was in Rebecca's character to do that. I think Pinborough isn't in touch with all of her characters, to tell you the truth. She establishes them well, but goes against their apparent natures just to feed her story line.

And what about the end where Matt and Rebecca choose to just go ahead and leave the base to travel to Edinborough on their own? And George decides to go back down by London on his own? Call me stupid, but the last time they traveled, in a much larger group, they got their asses handed to them. The first night, the widows destroyed their vehicles. Dan got bitten. Shit hit the fan. But now by the end of the book, we're just supposed to believe they can go on their own like that?

And this brings me to my biggest issue: the ending. Or lack thereof, to tell you the truth. This book did not end. It felt like a chapter ended. There was no climax or resolution to the story. We still don't know how the widows came about (they talked about hormone enhancement in food.. ha!... but even that lame theory wasn't proven in the book) or really, what happened. I know there is a sequel. Whoop de doo. I need some kind of resolution in the first book to call it a first book. Not a first half of a book, which is what this was. I don't know if I will read Feeding Ground or not. I want to know the why, but I don't know that I trust Pinborough to give it to me.

It was a hell of a ride, but endings like this one kinda piss me off. If all you want is creepiness, horror, and gore... this book is for you. If you actually like a structured story that builds to a logical ending, I'm thinking you might want to pass on this one. It started off so promising...

The Funeral (Richard Matheson)

This was an enjoyable read. It didn't take too long to get to the meat of the story: a sentimental vampire wants the one thing he never had--a funeral. It's a solid idea for a short story, and I think Matheson did a great job with this one. It's a humorous tale, and the very premise of it sets that tone. I guess it is debatable whether he should have qualified for a funeral or not. Vampires are undead. That is the very definition of not dead, and you have to die before you can have a funeral. However, if you were living, and then you are no longer living, then you're dead. Either undead or dead, but some kind of dead. If you look at it from that point a view, it makes sense that the vampire could feel cheated out of getting a funeral like all the other dead people got. I kind of side with the latter view point, and found myself rooting for the vampire to get a nice funeral.

The comedy hit its peak with the cast of characters that were apparently his friends: a witch and her cat, a hunchback, a werewolf, and the white-haired gentleman (not sure what type of monster he was supposed to be). They all had distinctive characters, but the witch really stole the show. They turned what is normally a sad and depressing event into a reality-TV show-like scene of one person who is trying to deal with something serious and meaningful in his life (the vampire and his funeral) and everyone else being so self-absorbed that they getting caught up in their own lives, at the expense of all but ruining the event.

The vampire takes it all in stride though, apparently satisfied enough with the outcome, and recommends the funeral home and its director to his friends, ensuring a new form of regular clientele to Clooney’s Cut-Rate Catafalque.

I thought there were some strong contrasts in this tale. The first is whether or not the vampire deserved to have a funeral in the first place. I could see the argument against it. Vampires generally remember the days they were a live. In many ways, the never did die. That's why they're called undead. But what about a zombie? They're also undead, but I'd think they would probably deserve a funeral. And what about a ghost? They might need a funeral to find eternal peace. Another contrast was the setting versus the characters. A funeral is as solemn an event as they come. It's just not a place for humor. Yet the characters bring such a disregard to the solemness of the funeral, their actions are more out of place and hard to believe than the monsters themselves, given where they are and what the funeral means to their friend. Finally, you could say there were two vampires in the story. The way the funeral director is portrayed, and really, that line of work in general, it was akin to sucking grieving victims dry. That concept is contrasted by the actual vampire, who seemed to have more feeling, sentimentality, and even humanity than the living man did.