12 months days of lycanthropy: Cycle of the werewolf by Stephen King

The orange harvest moon is full, or just past it as I write this review, hiding up in the clouds and peeking out occasionally, only to go back under cover soon after.
It’s hard to call this a modern werewolf story, even when it was first published it was a throwback to older ways of looking at the creature. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily, because having Reverend Lowe change only at the full moon allows King to limit his destruction to one night, or at least the few nights where the moon is truly full.
The werewolf has less rules to obey than the vampire. He doesn’t need to hide from the general population all the time, and on the nights he does, well, the public is better off hiding from him. There’s no feeding restrictions or things it has to avoid, except for silver and sometimes wolfsbane. So the only real “curses” a werewolf works under are the pull of the moon and the fact that in the beginning they don’t remember what they’ve done, though that changes as time goes on.
That’s why the Reverend is truly a monster and not just someone cursed. He chooses to continue his rampage when he could at least try to stop himself. He’s no Lawrence Talbot, fighting against the curse instead of giving in to it. He enjoys the power; it seduces him, though maybe it doesn’t have to try very hard to do so. The werewolf starts out as the monster, but under its influence, Reverend Lowe becomes one, even going so far as to plan Marty’s murder to keep his secret safe.
It’s even in his name: Lowe. Being cursed brings him down to a ‘low’ state where he enjoys killing and doesn’t want ever to have to stop. Plotting Marty’s murder, something that should be anathema to a “man of God” is done for the simple reason that he knows what Lowe is. There’s no real moral consideration. It’s not wrong for Lowe, it’s just something that needs to be done.
The Reverend in Cycle isn’t as well drawn as, say, Father Callahan from King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, though there are similarities between the two. We’re never sure how much he believes in his God, though we can assume that before his cursing he was a man of some faith. While faith and its failure are the crux of the struggle for Father Callahan, for Reverend Lowe, they’re not even an issue. Maybe because werewolves aren’t subject to the demands of faith, as say a vampire would be, so that internal struggle is somewhat cut short. This might be due to space considerations on King’s part, but I think it was a conscious choice to make Reverend Lowe stick by his choice to be the monster.
Lowe echoes Mother Abigail from The Stand, though probably not as accurately, when he says that “all things serve the will of God.” What to her is an expression of faith is a rationalization he uses so he can keep on killing. I think he gives in very easily to the curse with no real kind of struggle. He wants to be the monster, as it frees him from all the societal constraints that are put on him.
There’s another connection with ‘Salem’s Lot, and that’s Clyde Corliss. He runs away from that town and settles in Tarker’s Mill, only to be killed by the werewolf.
The movie of this story is called Silver Bullet and it starred, among others, Gary Busey and Corey Haim. They took a bit more of an empathic track with Lowe. He’s the perfect minister most of the time, but as the moon gets closer, the Beast gets stronger. Once he figures out it’s Marty sending the letters, he terrorizes him a little, which makes him less likeable, but overall movie Lowe comes out as a more sympathetic character than the one in the book. This could be due to the added characterization given in the film, but I think it’s more the fact that while he’s a monster, he doesn’t actively choose to embrace the Beast like the Reverend in the book.
King follows a fairly classic reveal for who the werewolf is, and that’s the missing body part. The first time this occurred in a werewolf tale was in the 1500’s. A nobleman hears the tale of a hunter who fought off a marauding wolf the night before, managing to drive the creature away after cutting off a paw, which is in a pouch that the hunter presents to the noble. Instead of a paw inside, there’s a severed hand with a ring worn by the nobleman’s wife. Going to her room, they find the woman in bed with a bloody cloth wrapped around her hand. She eventually confesses to being a werewolf and is burned at the stake for her crimes.

Rawhead Rex by Clive Barker

So Clive Barker, in an interview, once said that this story was about “A twelve foot tall phallus that is defeated by a symbol of womanhood. Monster on a rampage stories are about the phallic principle. Large males run around terrorizing women.”
I’ll admit that when I read the name of the story, I did kind of wonder about it, and there are some descriptions of Rawhead that enhance that impression.
But we’re going to ignore that for the moment and talk about the monster. Barker didn’t invent the word ‘Rawhead’, it’s half the name of a creature that’s referred to as Rawhead and Bloody Bones, an English monster that sits in the under the cellar stairs or in the cupboards under the stairs (Watch out Harry Potter!).
When an unsuspecting child would go down into the cellar, the creature would reach through the gaps between the risers and grab the kid by the ankle and pull them through the gap and have a little snack.
Barker takes this idea of child snatching and adds a level of last monster alive to the story. Rawhead Rex is the last of his kind, a throwback to an earlier age when his race owned the land the town of the humans is now built on. He reminds me a bit of Grendel from Beowulf, though Rawhead has no mother to mourn his death, he’s alone.
While I’m not sure I feel sympathy for a creature that eats children and baptizes people by urinating on them (I can only imagine what Communion or Confirmation would be for his worshippers) there is a feeling of melancholy when the villagers smash in his pumpkin-looking head.
The crazy thing is, if this story had been set in medieval times, there never would have been an ounce of sympathy for the marauding beast. But because the story is set in a modern era, it adds a sense of being out of place to Rawhead. Like we say of people who have inappropriate thinking for 2010, Rawhead Rex is a “product of his time,” and somehow that makes the reader feel a bit sad for him. Maybe not when he’s eating children, but he’s just trying to survive the only way he knows how. I feel like he’s also taking revenge for his own slaughtered people too, and that’s an understandable motivation.
One of the easiest ways to stop your enemy is to destroy their young. In Rawhead’s case, this might have worked better if he’d been more than just one lone monster, but I guess in some situations you just have to go with what you know. Child eating does sort of bring me back to Barker’s quote in the beginning of this post, because in most cases, threatening a child causes more fear for parents than actually threatening them does. In nature this is mostly done by the males.
Does all this add up to Rawhead Rex being an effective monster? I think so.
But I have a bit of pity for him as well. In a time before cars and TV and guns and modernity, Rawhead Rex was enough of a terror that they sealed him away instead of killing him. They feared him so much that they didn’t even consider destroying him as an option. When he’s let loose in this world, it doesn’t take long before the villagers band together and take him down. You have to wonder if he was sorry he ever climbed out of that hole in the field in the first place.
Rawhead “Rex” is a king with no subjects or kingdom. Everything he used to have has been stripped away. Now there might have been good reason (the whole child devouring thing), but I still can’t help but feel a bit sad for him.
There’s a really terrible movie made of this story, but if you’re a Clive Barker fan, then it must receive a lot of love despite its awfulness. It was the hatchet job they did on this story that made Barker decide to direct his own movies, and the firstborn child of that decision was ‘Hellraiser.’
All hail Rawhead Rex!

Breeding Ground by Sarah Pinborough

Sarah Pinborough’s Breeding Ground starts off with a fabulous premise of monsters that come from the wombs of the women that men love. The origin of the creatures preys on the paternal and maternal fear of something being wrong with their baby, as well as the feeling in a man that since they can’t get pregnant they don’t know what it’s like. All the baby books and fake pregnancy bellies in the world can’t give the feeling of another person being born from you. There’s a wonderful element of body horror in the story, and the fact that probably all the characters will at some point birth creatures of their own, despite surviving is chilling.
Matt attributes Chloe’s changes in mood and attitude to her being pregnant, until everything starts to go horribly wrong. The horror is compounded when the doctor that Matt takes Chloe to see says that it’s happening all over the country, there’s no way to stop it, and it’s better if she just doesn’t know.
Once the creature’s loose, and it’s a big, nasty spiderish thing, the horror kind of takes a downturn. While I’m not opposed to spider-monsters in particular, Pinborough doesn’t really give them a lot to do beyond terrorizing people for a little while and breaking up cars. It’s as if the creatures just ran out of motivation to kill anyone after a while. They also could have benefitted from some kind of intelligence beyond a normal spider’s. While there may be some incidents, such as the car smashing, that point to their being more than normal creatures, they don’t really get to do much.
The story becomes a zombie movie in some way, because the creatures don’t act with any malevolence. That’s where the book’s main failing came from. Pinborough created a monster, that while not wholly original, was creepy and interesting enough to carry an entire story, but somehow one just never developed. The Widows did have some interesting qualities to them. I particularly like the web creation effect of their bites, and the fact that the males eventually started to birth monsters as well.
I wanted to see the Widows do something! Sure, they didn’t necessarily have to, since they “win” in the end, but there could’ve been a lot more horror if Chloe’s consciousness had stayed in the Widow and followed Matt for a final confrontation.
Every good monster story has an explanation of where the creature comes from, even if that answer is “Somewhere Out There.” The only “answer” for the Widows is genetically altered food, and even that is a guess. I’d have liked to see Matt decide that he wants to get to the bottom of what happened to Chloe and look for some damn answers. I was excited when the scientist guy mentioned capturing a live Widow for study. I wanted to see what they’d discover about the creatures and get perhaps another idea of where they might be from.
The fact that they were harmed by deaf people’s blood was kind of an odd thing, but I was willing to go along with it for the sake of the story and to see what Pinborough would make out of it. And then she really did nothing with it, though I did wonder where exactly those men were getting enough blood to paint the streets red.
The environmental changes were a nice touch, but I really wanted the creatures to have some sort of overriding motivation. It hurt the story that nothing ever materialized along that vein.
I’m kind of wondering if another POV might have helped explain the widows more. If we had an idea of what was going through Chloe’s mind as the thing developed within her, would that have made a difference to our understanding of the Widow by the end of the story?

The Funeral by Richard Matheson

Matheson, along with Robert Bloch and the Twilight Zone really ruined it for us later writers: the twisty, unexpected ending. Unless you’re M. Night Shyamalan, the twist is something to stay away from, because of stories like Matheson’s The Funeral.
There’s a fascination with death in this story, and of the “proper” rites needed for a soul to attain peace, even if that soul is still up and walking around. Ludwig may be outside of normal human society, but he still feels compelled to observe the rituals of it. Partly because that’s where the punchline of the story comes from, but also because it humanizes him a bit and makes the reader feel they can be on his side.
If this story reads to you, like an episode of the Twilight Zone, well it’s not. It’s a Night Gallery, and one very typical of the sorts of stories that ended up on that series. It almost makes a better teleplay than it does a story, the actors add a dimension that not everyone’s imagination can live up to.
The story is full of little gags, from the funeral director’s last name, Silkline, to the hairy handed man running off into the night and the strange baying noise accompanied by the sound of four running feet across the carpet.
So what does the story specifically say about monsters? Well, Ludwig Asper, despite being already dead, wants what every living person dreads: A funeral. And it doesn’t even go that well, at the end, the witch and the Count start fighting and ruin everything, but Ludwig is happy anyway that at least now he can say he’s done it. Matheson manages to humanize Asper with his crazy need to be eulogized. He gives him a recognizable human quality, that of wanting something, beyond blood or flesh or killing. And not only does he want it, he demands it be perfect. While Asper’s friends don’t seem to understand the importance of it to him, the reader cringes with Silkline as things start to take a turn for the worse.
The clues presented in the beginning that lead the reader to believe that Ludwig is something more than human are subtle. Him wanting the mirror gone, the references to never having done the funeral right the first time. It becomes sort of a parody of weddings. Ludwig could become something of a FuneralZilla if things don’t go his way.
That everything goes right up to a certain point and then falls apart is another way to make Asper and his crew more like real people.
A “special day” no matter what it is, is never entirely free of bad or wrong things happening, and that’s where the humor comes in. Matheson also plays up the monster tropes to add humor to an already odd situation.
The great thing about this story is that there’s no mention of the words ‘vampire’ ‘witch’ ‘werewolf’ or any kind of identifier, though most of the types are clear from the description of the characters and their actions.
There are other really good stories in this particular collection. ‘In Shadowed Places’ is my favorite, though the other, much shorter, funeral story is excellent as well.