Cycle of the Werewolf

I’ve never been much a comic book enthusiast. I’m not a huge fan of werewolves. (I know, you’re probably wondering at this point what monsters I actually like, and the answer to that would be: the ones that live next door.) So honestly, the only reason I’d ever read Cycle of the Werewolf was because it was a Stephen King novel. I wouldn’t count it among my top 20 favorite King works, and though he has quite a body of work, that says something.

Re-reading it for this assignment, however, altered my perception of it, and now I’m of two minds.

First, here is what I loved about this book. I really enjoyed the setting. When I first read this book 20 years ago, I had no idea places like Tarker Mills existed. Now I live in an equally small, clannish, backwater town, and I think King did a masterful job of capturing the essence of small town life. He does this in a lot of his work, of course, but the brevity of this work necessitated that he capture small town life in a nutshell, and I think he did a bang up job. I would even say this work is Hemingway-esque.

Getting back to what I said about liking monsters who live next door, I loved the fact that the Beast turned out to be a Baptist minister (I’m a recovering Southern Baptist, y’all). I thought the notion of the Beast being destroyed by a puny kid in a wheelchair and his bad boy uncle was delightful and ironic. However, I would have enjoyed more background on all three: Reverend Lowe, Marty Coslaw and Uncle Al. I thought the relationship between Marty and the rest of his family could have been fleshed out a lot more, and I was disappointed by the ambiguity.

Now, on to the Beast itself. He just didn’t do it for me. He didn’t scare me, and I wasn’t invested enough in any of his victims to care what he did to them. Some of this was due to the omniscient point of view. The same brevity that lent itself perfectly to capturing small town life in a nutshell worked against the attack scenes; they were too short and I think King could have gone a lot farther in both developing his victim characters and in describing their deaths. It was more like reading newspaper articles than reading a horror novel: just the facts, hold the gore. And let’s face it, people don’t read the newspaper for pleasure.

The illustrations that accompanied each attack scene I found cartoonish and not at all frightening. In fact, I would go so far as to say they made the work comic, pun intended. If the material itself had been more humorous, the illustrations would have been appropriate, but it really wasn’t.

In short, I found this to be a quick, engaging read, but I probably won’t read it again. Cycle of the Werewolf falls squarely in the “meh” category in my view.