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.