Cycle of the Werewolf

So the first week has gone by and I've stuck to the schedule including my writing schedule. I really hope I can keep it up because the first few days is always easy when starting a routine. Anyway, I promised a review of Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf, so here it is.

Let me begin with the statement that I love Stephen King. He is the author who made me want to be a writer. His prose is extremely concise, poetic, and entertaining all at once. I mean, he's no Vladimir Nabokov when it comes to poetic prose but he does know how to turn a phrase. And boy, does he know how to write a story.

That being said, he does not know how to write an ending. This is his major shortcoming, in my opinion. I read his novel Rose Madder with a reckless need to get to the end and see how the main character, Rose, escaped her abusive husband, Norman. Throughout that novel, Rose was strong and witty and outsmarted Norman at every turn. It was a psychological thriller. But then, about three-fourths of the way into Norman's downfall, the book became supernatural. Now, I saw this coming because there was foreshadowing afoot, and I'm aware it was Stephen King and I shouldn't have suspected any less but...but...it took the story away from Rose as clever heroine and made it into Rose as superhero goddess with magical powers. But...but...she didn't need supernatural help. She was beating (pardon that terrible, terrible pun) Norman at his own game - psychological trickery. And I spent the final fourth of the novel deeply disappointed.

He has written some near-perfect novels (four out of seven Dark Tower novels, The Eye of the Dragon, It, The Dark Half, Carrie, The Shining, Insomnia, Desperation and The Regulators, and a few others I might be forgetting). But usually he's hit or miss, especially with the ending. Cycle of the Werewolf is meant to be more of a graphic novel than a real novel, so I tried to take this consideration into account while reading, but in the end I felt that good ol' disappointment I feel so often with King.

Werewolf follows the exploits of a werewolf for twelve months, and is broken up into twelve two-or-three page chapters. The longest chapter is maybe five pages. Now you know why I felt this book was a cop-out to begin with. It's enjoyable enough but it isn't scary and it isn't suspenseful. Part of this is because Berni Wrightson's illustrations often ruin the suspense by showing an integral piece of the story too early - but that was a stupid decision on the part of the layout editor, not really on the parts of King or Wrightson. The reveal of who is the werewolf might have been shocking if a full-page color drawing of that person weren't on the previous page (and there is no denying, from hints earlier in the story, that the picture is meant to reveal the werewolf). And then there is the unbelievably dense cops both on the local level and on the state level, the thin characters because we are getting comic-book-sized descriptions of personality without the convenience of a series to slowly add depth, and the conveniently perfect ending.

Hey, I love suspending disbelief. My favorite short story, Light is Like Water by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is about boys who find a way to swim in light. But in the total five pages of that story, I believe they can swim in light. In the 128 pages of Werewolf, I receive no clue of how the boy hero attained the amazing ability he shows. It makes some of the emotion of the earlier chapters, including the ones where frightened townsfolk classically hunt the werewolf with shotguns and torches (there may not have been torches), seem cheapened. It's a dead ending furthermore because there is no falloff from the climax (important to the story according to Freytag's pyramid).

Anyway, overall grade: C. Entertaining enough to not be put down but not enough to be read again or be recommended. Lacks engaging characters and suspenseful plot but King just can't be boring and has a powerful writing style.

My weekly readings started on January 1, 2010 and therefore I will begin each week on Friday to keep the routine going. This upcoming week will see me reading as such:

Friday: The Mahabharata, ten pages
Saturday: The Koran/Qaran/Qur'an, ten pages
Sunday: The Bible, ten pages
Monday: The Analects of Confucius and Tao Te Ching, ten pages
Tuesday: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, ten pages
Wednesday: The Selected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, ten pages
Thursday: On the Origin of Stories, by Brian Boyd
Weekly Book: The Narrow House by Evelyn Scott, 32 pages a day to finish in a week
3.5 pages written on a short story
3.5 pages written on novel

Some explaining (this is a very long post, isn't it?), on why I'm reading what I am. First, the religious doctrines - armed with knowledge, you know? And because if I ever chose a religion, it would probably be Taoist. I mean, go appreciate a tree and don't kill anyone. That's a philosophy I can get behind. (That's what my religion professor said on the day we learned about Taoism. Not the "don't kill anyone" part, but it was implied.) The White Tiger because it won the Man Booker Prize 2008 and has been really funny so far. Borges because I've been trying to get through all of his writing for a long, long time. The Origin of Stories because it is really interesting but far too "academic" to read in large portions. The Narrow House because I had to buy it for a class I dropped, it had been out of print for some odd seventy years, was really hard to find, and I bought it for $.03 at Amazon after searching far and wide for it everywhere else on the planet. And its writing style is subject-verb-predicate, over and over repetitively, which is my writing style for fiction and I felt a camaraderie.

The little, tiny amount of writing? Because I'm afraid of writing now thanks to a certain professor who was never my professor but had to be on my thesis committee and implied I was not good enough to be at grad school (actually, she all but said she felt they made a mistake with me). Screw her. I'm going to get back my confidence, in baby steps. I would just like to let everyone know that three of the professors I did have were wonderful and encouraging, but sometimes all it takes is one bad apple as it goes....