Tuesday, October 12, 2010

J-Horror: The Werewolf

I was pleasantly surprised by Angela Carter's The Werewolf; it was much different than I expected, both in story and in writing style. I was expecting a standard wolf-man type story from The Werewolf because of its fairly generic sounding title, but I'd heard the name "Angela Carter" before and was curious to see what made her such an interesting author. What impressed me initially about her short story was the concise but mysterious way in which it was written. Nearly everything in The Werewolf is described in short, rather harsh sentences, each written in the present tense. This gives the whole story a feeling of immediacy that makes every twist feel much more abrupt and heightens the
What I found interesting about The Werewolf's story was the combination of witches and wolf-people. When I first read the line about the wolves, the vampires, and the witch, I assumed they were all separate entities, and when the "good child" was attacked by the wolf I wasn't particularly surprised. But when the grandma turned out to be the wolf and a witch, I was a little stunned, which I always a nice feeling when reading horror.
If I had a single complaint about the Werewolf it would be that it is very short. We are given a rather abstract plot, an unexpected twist is set up, and this twist is executed nicely in the ending. But afterwards we are left with very little. I would be eager to know, for example, the story of what happened to the little girl after her grandma was driven away, and even more excited if I was given a little more detail about how she felt about the whole affair. The plot seems like it’s more of an engine to move the story into its suspenseful parts then a catalyst for character development. This probably has a lot to do with the kind of story Carter was writing: it was a short story and needed to be pithy and clear. It still would have been nice, however, to get more of the girl, and of her world before the story ended.

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