Cycle of the Werewolf: 500 Days of Wolf Man
2022 Halloween Spooktacular: Werewolf Week Day #6
I’ll get this out of the way right away: I could have done something similar to my Bad Moon/Thor entry and co-featured Cycle of the Werewolf with its film adaption, 1985's Silver Bullet. The reason I’m not is simple. I just don’t rate it very highly. In my opinion, Bad Moon has a lot more going for it and is more worthy of discussion. Cycle of the Werewolf, on the other hand, is a wonderfully written and richly illustrated novella — and possibly, my favorite thing with King’s name on it.
The book is broken up over the course of a year and the monthly werewolf’s attacks throughout. The structure seems tailor made for a streaming adaptation — 12 months broken up over 12 episodes. I’m kinda shocked it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it has something to do with the rights? Or maybe it has to do with the perception of the wolf man these days. Or MAYBE it has to do with some of the similarities between it and Midnight Mass, which already feels like a King adaptation, and features a man of god who is unwittingly transformed into a monster.
Anyway, each month we get a new chapter with the wolf. Its victims are unconnected members of the community of Tarker’s Mills, Maine — a railroad worker, a boy flying a kite, a lonely seamstress, the owner of the local diner. None can witness it and live. That is, until July, when a 10 year-old parapalegic boy in a yoda mask blasts it in the eye with some firecrackers. The boy, Marty, becomes the beast’s ultimate foil and, through his encounter, is able to uncover the mystery of whodunnit (the guy who started sporting an eye patch over the summer, of course).
It’s a simple story, but Wrightson’s illustrations elevate it. The werewolf and its facility with violence are plain to see in the drawing above, but each month has a different way of capturing the terror. Around Valentine’s Day, the wolf is posed in something of an embrace with his lovelorn victim. After the episode with the boy and kite, we get a simple sketch of a lonely tether. In September, all we see is a picture of the aftermath: a pen of brutally slain pigs. Wrightson does the work of the reader’s imagination for them and in ways that open it up for deeper feelings of grief, pain, horror and, eventually, triumph.
My favorite twist on the werewolf myth in Cycle of the Werewolf is how Reverend Lester Lowe becomes the beast. We don’t start off the novella knowing he’s the killer, but once May rolls around, he has a nightmare where his entire congregation turns into werewolves and, when he wakes up, the church custodian is dead on the pulpit. So was Lester bit? Did he drink water out of a wolf’s paw print? Did sell his soul to the devil? No. None of the above.
In fact, there’s no definitive answer, but Rev. Lowe has his theories. He believes the curse’s origins are some flowers he picked from the cemetary. When he brought said flowers back to the church and attempted to put them in a vase, they quickly turned black and died. Just imagine that! You’re a man of god — a pillar of the community — and all you do is pick some flowers. Sure, I don’t have much of a green thumb, myself, but I’ve never had a newly potted plant die immediately before my eyes. That must have been disconcerting for the poor guy. And then, a few months later, you transform into a werewolf. You think back to those weirdly hostile flowers and realize: well, that must have been it. There’s absolutely no warning there. At least someone who was attacked by a “large dog” under the light of a full moon would suspect, maybe, that they’re cursed, before their eventual transformation.
Lester Lowe’s story is so much more tragic though. It really gives this story’s version of the curse an appropriate infusion of mystery. The werewolf is a known creature of the supernatural and it’s supposed to have rules. But who divines these rules? Who can truly know the mechanism of such of thing? The lycanthrope is a being derived from nature and the savage unknown. Was it the act of picking the flowers? Was it the grave on which they grew? Was it transporting them to the church? Or some combination of all three? What’s the closest some innocuous act in your little life came to turning you into a monster?
Is it scary? Yeah, it’s got the spookiness.
Read it? I feel like the book was out of print for awhile. It’s been around a long time. I used to flip through it in my elementary school library when I could work up the nerve. I wanted to revisit it a few years ago, but I couldn’t find it new copies for sale and old ones were outrageously priced. Thankfully, it got a reprint in 2019, so go pick up a copy.
