I don’t want to give the wrong impression with this post title. I sort of liked Jonathan Maberry’s The Wolfman. Depending on when you ask me, I might even tell you I liked it a lot. I certainly enjoyed the book for a while, but as it got closer to the end, its appeal diminished. I’ll get to that in due time, so there will be spoilers in this post.
At least it really was Lon Chaney, Jr.
First, though, I’d like to briefly talk about werewolves, wolfmen, whatever you want to call them. Of the classic monsters, I’m the least familiar with them. Off the top of my head, I went into this book most familiar with Angua von Uberwald, Remus Lupin, Chris Jennings, Quentin Collins, and Lawrence Talbot. But don’t get your hopes up at that last one–I haven’t seen the original The Wolf Man movie, either. Instead, I’ve seen Talbot in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. So if I say anything that suggests I’m missing the point, well, I don’t have as much knowledge about this particular monster.
For example, is there a difference between a “wolfman” and a “werewolf”? Years ago, I thought there was, but more and more I think the two terms are used for the same thing–a man who transforms into a wolf (usually at the full moon). The Wolfman confused me even further about this near the end (spoilers!) when it arbitrarily assigns the name “The Wolfman” to one character and “The Werewolf” to another. I did appreciate that Maberry did something to keep track of who was who in that scene, but it also felt to me like there should be something significant about the names if they were to be assigned that way. It bugged me.
I have not seen the movie that this book was adapted to, so I cannot compare the two. I will say that I’ve read several novel adaptations of movies and games. Sometimes they work really well, and other times it’s painfully obvious that they’re adaptations. This fell somewhere in the middle for me.
Then again, no one was beaten with it.
All right, enough about the cane. Let’s talk about the Wolfman itself. It made a good monster–threatening, ruthless, and super-strong. The scene when it ravages the gypsy camp is notable not only because Lawrence is bitten in that scene, but also because it just demonstrates the monster as a majorly destructive force. The later scenes worked in that regard as well. So on that level, the Wolfman is a great monster.
However, I thought a key point of this sort of story was the werewolf character’s guilt and sense of responsibility for the people he kills during the full moon. As a wolf, he is an unreasoning, amoral monster, while as a man, he suffers from the knowledge that he’s dangerous. I expected a lot more of that in The Wolfman than we got. There were a couple of scenes where Lawrence brought it up, and of course we saw Sir John’s method of containing himself in the past (though he’s given that up by the time the story takes place and has become a pretty malevolent werewolf), but it didn’t feel like a central theme. After Lawrence was bitten, more of the focus seemed to be on Sir John as the primary monster, with Dr. Hoenneger and his lackeys as secondary monsters (of the human variety).
My other problem with the second half of the book is that after Lawrence transforms, we aren’t left with anyone to root for. We can root for the Wolfman when it goes after someone like Hoenneger, but not when it goes after innocent people, and it’s hard to feel any connection with an assortment of random innocent people there to be killed by the monster. We can root for Gwen Conliffe, but she only gets a couple of point of view chapters near the end. Maybe we were supposed to root for Aberline, but if that’s the case, it missed me entirely. I didn’t like him.
My feelings on The Wolfman are mixed. I enjoyed many things in this book and found some parts to be handled quite well, especially at the start. But with the lack of emotional connections and the lack of focus on Lawrence’s internal conflict, the last parts of the book felt hollow to me. It might be because it was an adaptation of a movie, but whatever the reason was, it didn’t work for me. At least the wolf’s head cane-sword made a reappearance.
That’s about that, but one thing I want to say before I end this is that I was pleased that the townspeople and Lawrence himself readily accepted the existence of the Wolfman when they saw it. It was a refreshing change from stories where characters persistently deny the supernatural even in the face of evidence.
