The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice

I should know better. Anne Rice wrote some interesting books earlyin her career, but even in the best of her books, she had a tendency to concentrate on description and sacrificing story and character.

I very much liked this in a couple of books, such as Belinda, where the lush descriptions of the protagonist's surroundings made sense as he was an artist. But in The Wolf Gift, she obviously has decided to save a lot of the story for the sequel(s), so she spends a lot of time describing a house. A big house. It has a lot of rooms in it. A lot of different furniture. Heavy silverware and lots of beautiful china. At first, it has no TVs but after the caretaker follows instructions, there are flat screen TVs.

Ok, yes, there is a dreamy young man named Reuben, younger son of a rich family in San Francisco, who is a poet by nature but is dabbling as a reporter, and he is visiting this historic home to write a story about it. He and his hostess are attacked in the night. She is killed. He is badly bitten by some kind of monster. Over the next few days, he heals remarkably quickly, finds out he turns into a Man Wolf every night, and is compelled to attack and kill evildoers and rescue victims.

Everything else is this naive young man reveling in his change. I allow a couple of "gimmes" in a book like this - I will buy the first premise to allow the author to tell her story - but if she then fails to justify the rest of her story, if she makes people react to her premise with false emotion, then I am done. In this case, when Reuben, as the Man Wolf, comes upon a house in the forest where a woman lives alone, and she sees him and has absolutely no surprise or fear, and welcomes him into her house and into her bed, the only response I can make to that is, "Oh, come on!" If I hadn't been reading it on my Nook, I would have slammed the book shut.

Waste of time.

11/22/63

I indulged in this latest Stephen King "what if" historical fiction novel for my Nook. There is a distinct line between King's horror novels and his speculative fiction, in my mind, and the latter to me are much more interesting reads. I don't find the gore all that interesting - although I have read some of them in the past.

In this book, King poses the question that many in our generation have undoubtedly wondered about - "what if JFk's assassination didn't happen?". As information has emerged in the last fiftysome years about Kennedy's personal life, I think many people have realized that a part of the charm and reverence with which we regarded President Kennedy had a lot to do with the fact that he left us too soon. I remember thinking just recently that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 might not have made it with Kennedy as President - as a Northeastern elitist, I am not sure he could have sold it in the south the way that Johnson, the Texan, did.

But of course the fun of King's writing is not about the high level overview, but in the life and experience of one ordinary guy who is faced with the opportunity and the challenge of living in the past, tracking Lee Harvey Oswald, spying with technology that is far more primitive than what he would have available in 2011. And Jake, a high school English teacher, is not prepared for much of what he has to do to survive while waiting for his moment.

One common return-to-the-past trope is the idea of funding your life by betting on things you know will happen - sports events, election results, and so forth. But even if the past is unchanged by your entry into it, King also pinpoints another problem - bookies don't like people who win these kind of bets. There isn't a safe yet anonymous way to do something like that in the 1960s.

Altogether, I think King posed some good questions and stayed true to the consequences of his premise. An enjoyable read.

Reading now, reviewing later: The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice; The Memoirs of John F. Kennedy by Donald James Lawn; Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.