leeper@mtgzz.UUCP (m.r.leeper) (06/12/85)
CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF by Stephen King
(Illustrations by Berni Wrightson)
Signet, 1985 (copyright 1983), $8.95.
A book review by Mark R. Leeper
The current trend in science fiction seems to be to take popular
novelettes, illustrate them, and then publish them--puffed up with lots of
blank space--as books unto themselves, with price tags between $7 and $10.
Steven King's horror novelette "Cycle of the Werewolf" was originally
published as a hard-back with illustrations by comic-book artist Berni
Wrightson for some absurd price. Now Signet has reprinted it as a
paperback, with the Wrightson illustrations, at the comparatively cheap
price of $8.95, so you can imagine what the full price was. For that price,
you get about fifty short pages of text, the Wrightson illustrations, and a
lot of white space.
The story is about the year-long campaign of a werewolf. It is broken
into twelve chapters, one for each month. Each takes place on the night of
the full moon in that month (it happens in a rather idealized year in which
there is precisely one full moon each calendar month). Most of the chapters
just chronicle one werewolf attack. With all that attacking, there is very
little time for any real plot development. In fact, there is very little in
the way of characters continuing from chapter to chapter. That makes the
plot violent but very minimal.
Wrightson's illustrations are like very good comic-book art. His
vision of a werewolf is much like the title character in Frank Frazetta's
painting "The Werewolf" or like the lycanthropes in the film THE HOWLING.
If it's borrowed, at least it is borrowed from the best. If there is any
werewolf that would scare me to run into, it is certainly the sort of
werewolf shown in THE HOWLING. It is sort of a grizzly bear with a wolf's
head. That's worse than anything Lon Chaney, Jr. ever turned into. So the
illustrations are all right, but expect to pay a real premium for them.
There is hardly enough story to rate here, but overall the package get -1 on
a scale of -4 to +4.
Mark R. Leeper
...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper