The Cycle of Inconsistency (Cycle of the Werewolf Review)

The Cycle of the Werewolf is actually the first ever writing I have read by Stephen King. As far as an introduction to the author goes, Stephen King to me is alright. I wouldn’t put him up there with J.K. Rowling for popular authors, because I don’t think he deserves all the hype and fame he has. However, his writing is at least clean and entertaining when the plot isn’t dragging.

Now, I have some experience with King, just not in text form. I know the movie The Shining, and I know the play Carrie. Both of these I found interesting. The Cycle of the Werewolf, being the first novel I’ve read of his, did not hold up to those standards. It wasn’t terrible, but I had high expectations going in, and those expectations were not met. I was let down.

The book fell into two categories for me:

Good chapters- Jan, Mar, Apr, June, Aug, Oct, Nov, Dec

Bad chapters- Feb, May, July, Sept

We just discussed a chapter in Writer’s Workshop of Horrors (WWoH) on tone and writing style. I can’t say one way or another if this is normal for King’s tone, but I feel like the fact that the chapters jump between good and bad makes me feel like the writing style is very inconsistent. In some chapters there are beautiful phrases, rhetorical elements, and interesting plot twists. In others, the scenes drag on, the word choices are cliché, and the prose is too repetitive. The chapters are all over the place.

Now, some of the clichés work for me, such as the end of the very first chapter of the book. “—it is all black winter and dark ice. The cycle of the Werewolf has begun,” may be a bit cheesy, but it’s also a nice way to incorporate the title of the book into the story. However, other examples don’t work for me at all, such as, “Love, Stella Randolph thinks, lying in her narrow virgin's bed…” or the repetitive, “’You always get what you want! Just because you're a cripple!’"

The story really picks up after the first survival of a victim (during July). Even though I thought the chapter July drug on too long before getting to evening, it did a good job of setting up the story for the later recurrence of those characters. I understand the importance of having the previous murders by the werewolf mentioned for build-up, but this book should have started in June. That’s the chapter when a victim first sees the person change under the moonlight, and then the chapter after that is when we get the ‘main’ character of Marty introduced and survives. All the earlier chapters are either irrelevant information to build up to a murder, or boring dialog of townsfolk talking about the werewolf. IT IS BORING.

That would be my summary of the book too. Even the end of the book, where I enjoyed the chapters, still drug on too long. I felt like there was too much unnecessary exposition and descriptions. I didn’t, but I wanted to skim.

Verdict: Skip the first 30% of the book. Or else, the pacing is better for a movie script instead.

Raw-Head Sex, Urine, Menstrual Blood, and Other Forgettable Fluids (Rawhead Rex)

After reading ‘Rawhead Rex’ by Clive Barker, I’d be interested to read more of the stories from the Books of Blood volumes. However, not because of Rawhead Rex because I didn’t particularly care for this story itself. The author’s writing style is what got me interested in other writing by him.

I found Rawhead Rex convoluted and disgusting. It was convoluted because of the many plot and setting inconsistencies. One plot inconsistency I found was why Rawhead didn’t fear the mom at the beginning on her period, if bleeding women was what he was scared of. He should have been afraid of her, and if he was, how was he able to overcome that and take the child from her arms anyway? How come bleeding women didn’t scare him, but a statue of a bleeding woman did?

The setting I also found confusing. I had to look up a whole slew of words while reading this short story: cleg, vestments, dyspeptic, aplomb, portico, eiderdown, peccadilloes, and copses. Now, some of these I can chalk up to not knowing religious terminology, and a few of them I was able to gauge through context, but I found this pulled me out of the story several times and forced me to reread sentences to glean that context. Now, this wouldn’t be a problem if the story had been set in the time when Rawhead was originally buried, back in older times. But this story was set in an age full of cars and modern police-issued guns. I didn’t feel like the vocabulary used in this story matched the time of the story, even if it semi-matched the setting of a small village. It didn’t work for me.

The point-of-view switches also didn’t work for me. I wish the author had either told the story from Rawhead’s perspective, or had switched POV between the victims of the monster. Instead, he does both of those, along with giving us POV from people who don’t even die from the monster. The uses of the characters names helped with this, but as you can tell from my above comment mentioning Gwen by description rather than name (I had to just scour the pages to find who the bleeding mother was), none of the characters other than Rawhead were memorable.

This is not a bad idea though. I think this would make an excellent movie if it isn’t already one. A child eater buried alive underground, but then reemerging after being forgotten by the descendants of the people that buried him and then ravaging the town. That’s a good movie. But the weird description and obsession with urine didn’t work in the story, and would be much better whether in text or on screen as blood. The ending of the book didn’t feel very satisfying for me with it ending talking about piss again. I wish it had ended with his skull being smashed in and brains going all over.

Yes, I understand this story was a lot about bodily fluids. It talks about urine, feces, menstrual blood, and much more. It even goes into great detail about the erections of men and their manhood being torn off. I’m sure it’s a social commentary on something. But the urine didn’t do it for me as a reader, and the description of Rawhead’s race having sex with the women didn’t make sense to me until he outrightly said it with the women not surviving childbirth of half-breeds. Somehow, in a story where the women are the monsters weakness, women don’t feel like heroes. They just feel objectified and useless.

I’m glad we are reading another story from Books of Blood, because I’m interested to see what else Barker has to offer, but I wouldn’t offer this story as a recommendation to my friends.

You Need To Own This Book—NOW! (Breeding Ground)

I think in this day and age where dystopian novels and apocalyptic video games are thriving, this would be an excellent book to hook my friends with.

I get most of my school books free through my local library, but “Breeding Ground” by Sarah Pinborough was so good that immediately after finishing the audiobook, I went out and bought myself a copy for my bookshelves. That fact is astounding, mainly because of my extreme arachnophobia, but I found myself adoring this apocalyptic tale of mutant spiders.

For a horror book, this book wasn’t all that horrendous. I mean this in the literal sense. There wasn’t much brutal killing. The build up of and revealing of the widows in the story was what made the book horror. Intensity, psychologically thrilling, but not scary. That is one of the reasons I was actually interested in a book about spiders. Yes, the creatures were described in great detail, their webbed murders and modes of being birthed gruesomely told in gorey detailed for readers. However, the actual deaths were left to the imagination. People were almost always killed ‘off screen’. Tension was key.

The real monster, and meat of this story, was the human’s interactions with one another. The lengths to which the survivors would go to keep themselves, and those they cared about, safe made this book more a story of an survival than that of running from monsters. The conflict moved away from being the widows outside the fence and more about the internal conflict happening to the women, between the men, and the unknown of what was happening to characters injured like Dave.

The one thing in the book that didn’t sit super well with me was the main character, Matt. He was not a super relatable character, and, as with I Am Legend, the male lead seems to be lust-filled despite lost lovers and the end of the world. Matt is willing to have sex with eventually both of the only two women left alive, and his is even after the death of his never-forgettable girlfriend Chloe and their unborn child (who was beautifully described half gnawed on in the womb by the way). I felt that his story telling was more of a camera lens he was showing us, which can work sometimes with novels written to be retellings. However, Matt didn’t do that for me, and I felt the character wasn’t relatable enough to warrant me following the scenes on his shoulder like a parrot.

I love that multiple classmates of mine have thought differently about the ending. Many think that the widows won in the end and killed all the humans. I initially thought that the humans would win after the chapter ended because of the discovery of the widows weaknesses and the people that were immune. The cliffhanger ending was very interesting to me, but also a bit cliché, seeming like it was purposely set up for a sequel instead of just to keep the reader guessing. However, if there is a book two or a movie adaptation, sign me up for the creepy crawlies.

My physical copy is shipping, and it is going to be borrowed out immediately to my sister. Nothing better for a sci-fi enthusiast than mutant spiders. This one’s going on the reread shelf.

The Funeral by Matheson: Is is Worth Your Time?

As far as short stories go, The Funeral by Richard Matheson is a quick 5 page read. It is very funny, and a quirky new take on funerals for the undead. However, I feel like the idea behind the story was much better in theory than when executed on the page.

From the very beginning, I found it hard for me to get drawn into the tale because of the language choices slowing my reading down. The word choice seemed a little superfluous. This could key in to the main character’s personality or social class, but for me it was a bit distracting. Within just the first two paragraphs, Matheson used the words “obsequies”, “placid clasp”, “sable leather”, and “curt acknowledgment”. One sentence that stood out to me and made me reread it was this bit of dialog: “Ah, good evening, sir,” he dulceted, his smile a precise compendium of sympathy and welcome, his voice a calculated drip of obeisance. I was always taught that unless it is necessary, always use ‘(s)he said’ so as not to distract the reader. I, for one, was very distracted by the language.

However, I still found this story a cute and silly read. I loved the twist of the funeral being for vampire Ludwig Asper himself. I also adore the hilarious entourage of supernatural beings that attended the funeral. The paragraph describing the monsters was the best part of the whole story.

This short story ties perfectly to the craft book my class is reading called Writers Workshop of Horror. We just read the chapter ‘Adding Humor to your Horror’ and this story is a perfect example of a tale that I feel isn’t actually horror, despite it’s inclusion of a lot of monsters. The humor leads more than the horror, and even though Silkline was scared of the monsters, I wasn’t. I feel this text falls more into the realm of fantasy rather than horror.

Silkline didn't feel like the protagonist of this story to me. He wasn't sympathetic in the beginning, being more a greedy salesman than someone for you to cry on and tell about your dead family. Then, during the funeral itself, he felt too passive, only reacting to the things he saw or what was said to him. He felt more like a camera to look through and less a character to relate to.

The beginning and end of this text I enjoyed. However, I felt the actual funeral part of the story was a little muddled. It became a mess of people talking over one another, between the witch, the waxen-faced man, the man giving the speech, and Ludwig himself. I know this was meant to be written this way, to emphasize the chaos that was happening during the funeral and make it feel jumbled, but it read confusing to me instead. I read ahead in Writers Workshop of Horror to the chapter ‘Middles: the Meat of the Matter’, and because of the funeral scene being a mess, I feel this story wasn’t able to fulfill the role of the middle of a story setting up the climax and satisfying the reader like a main course. It did set up the end scene of another monster coming in for a funeral well, but it didn’t leave me feeling closure for Asper’s funeral.

Overall, my take on The Funeral is it is a quirky read that I would recommend to people. Despite it’s flaws, it is a short enough read to be worth spending a few minutes getting through, and it is a good example of how to show up and coming writers how to incorporate humor into their writing.