The Wolf Gift [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

The Wolf Gift [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Product Details

Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Knopf; Book Club (BCE/BOMC) edition (February 14, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307595110
ISBN-13: 978-0307595119
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

By : Anne Rice
Price : $14.47
You Save : $11.48 (44%)

Customer Reviews

It has been years since I've read an Anne Rice novel, and I was initially hesitant about this one. However, the premise sounded interesting, so I ordered it anyway just out of curiosity. I'm very glad that I did. I started this book day before yesterday, but late in the evening , and went to bed only a couple of chapters in. I picked it up again yesterday afternoon - and by the time I realized that it was far past my bedtime, I was almost finished and NEEDED to see how it ended.
Reuben is a fledgling reporter in San Francisco, the youngest son of a fairly well-to-do family. He heads up to Mendocino County to do a story about an old house with a lot of history being sold. He finds himself falling in love with the place, but wakes during the night to hear his host being attacked. As he goes to defend her, he is attacked himself, and then mysteriously saved. During his recovery, he finds that he is...changing. He is becoming what he always assumed was a werewolf. But as he learns more about himself and his new abilities, he has to decide whether what is has been given is actually a curse - or whether it is truly a gift.
The Wolf Gift is not your typical werewolf story - it turns the genre on its head in more than one way. There is a strong thread of Good vs. Evil within the story, but the parts are not necessarily played by those you would expect. How does one know true Evil? Can something seen as evil actually be a servant of Good? Tied to the Good and Evil debate is a strong exploration of the existence of God, and our expectations of right and wrong.
However. This is not a heavy-handed religion book. This is an excellent novel with a fascinating and fast-paced story where part of the story includes a couple of strong themes woven throughout that make the story stronger rather than detracting from it.
Having not read an Anne Rice novel in years, I now find myself hoping that there might be a sequel in the works to continue this fascinating story. I don't know that another one could be as strong and do justice to this first one, but the characters are wonderful, and the whole novel is just so compelling, that I would love to read more.

Anne Rice's latest offering, "The Wolf Gift," marks her long awaited return to the Gothic Horror genre in which her popular Mayfair Witch and Vampire Chronicles reside, bringing the ancient werewolf myth, with certain strange new twists, into modern times. "The Wolf Gift" weaves a tale of complex moral questions, stark violence and monstrous brutality against a hauntingly picturesque Northern California.
Charmingly, in the Wolf Gift Ms. Rice has created her most eloquent tribute to the writers of the 1800s, those who wrote older Werewolf stories to which her "Distinguished Gentleman" sometimes refer. She sets the story not in summer, but in the perpetually rainy and overcast Bay Area of Wintertime, evoking images of Victorian Gothic Novels with their London weather. She paints her forests with damp under brush and rolling fogs, her architecture - especially the increasingly mysterious mansion at Nideck Point in Mendocino - with secret places, trapped doors, and the same kind of detailed and loving brush which caused Gothic Horror to be named for its Gothic architecture.
But below all of this is a modern take on the coming-of-age story. Set in the present, its protagonist is very unlike Interview with the Vampire's Louis, who had and lost a wife and family by the age of 25: Reuben is the modern boy-man; still unsure of who he is at the age of 23, and completely unable to break away from the expectations of a brilliant, overbearing mother. Intelligent and creative, but naive and sheltered, two years out of college, he is still having trouble defending starting out on a career path of his own choosing, and is still living at home with his parents. Even his girlfriend seems to be someone chosen to please his family. In a story that is peppered with contemporary technological elements such as Reuben's beloved iPhone; no device is as modern as Reuben himself, picture-perfect example of Generation Y and the American trend towards extended adolescence. Mr. Golding repeatedly protests his family (and girlfriend's) nicknames of Baby Boy, Little Boy, and Sunshine Boy, but despite his protestations, he is all of these things.
As a result, we have here, a story of a man-boy who becomes a man-wolf, and every element of Reuben's transformation: the erotic nature of the change, the overwhelming urge to protect the innocent through horrifically brutal acts; becomes an allegory for masculinity and the roles that have been taken away from generations of infantilized men such as Reuben: it is only later in the novel, when the Man Wolf Reuben begins to ask himself if any woman could ever find his original self, who he then describes as "vapid", as attractive. He struggles with something common for many young men: learning to balance what is dangerous and powerful in masculinity with what is gentle, and protective, and learning to view himself as a strong man in the eyes of a partner - not just a sweet boy in the eyes of a mother.
All of this folds into a romantic tale beautifully evocative of one of the most erotic of the Greco-Roman myths: the Tale of Eros and Psyche. Like Eros, Reuben is a young man dominated by his powerful mother (Venus), who seeks to break away and does so in falling in love with a beautiful woman who his mother treats as a competitor, rather than a daughter in law. In Reuben's case, his mother only wants him to develop a relationship with a woman very like herself, and who assists in her continued control over his destiny. She has no desire to allow her son to move out, grow up or become a man.
In every way, being bitten by a werewolf is the vehicle not only for Reuben's transformation from human into Morphenkind, but from boy into man in this powerfully brutal and erotic tale.