So I’ve been trying to read The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber as part of my reviews for Monster Librarian’s Werewolf month. I figured it has lasting merit to the genre since it helped shape the core of the “shape shifter genre” today. Except the first thing I noticed was how horribly dated it was.
I can ignore jabs, like a person being called a computer freak solely because they have a computer in their living room. But there are some really huge things keeping me from being able to get into this book
First, the characters are all encompassing. They aren’t really defined. This makes them uninteresting because they aren’t character, they are the author’s manipulatives to move the story along.
Then there’s some seriously sloppy police work here. I know that DNA and much of what we’re familiar with now didn’t exist when the book was published in 1978, much less when the book was written. There’s a lot of blah blah about corruption (everyone is apparently corrupt except the two leads, one of which is a woman and considered barely able to be a cop in the first place), and politics, but in the first two chapters all the corruption and politics talk has nothing at all to do with the plot. In fact this constant wonder of who is corrupt and who is going to pull strings to prevent the leads from doing their job completely distracts the reader from the plot. The lead characters arrive at the scene, look at the bodies, get upset by them, leave, drive to get the photos (which are already developed even though the scene is still being processed?), talk about what trace evidence was found (seriously, less than an hour from leaving the scene) then arrive at the ME office just in time to attend the autopsy, which takes about 20 minutes. Then the two leads go to a canine expert, who says it’s not dogs followed by the Captain of the Detectives’ office where the man becomes irate that the autopsy determined that dogs, or some other beast killed the victims (two cops on duty), takes the cops off the case for incompitence and says he’s going to tell the press that the cops were poisoned instead, and if the leads do anything about it he’ll have them fired and the female lead’s husband investigated for being on the take.
Seriously? That’s not compelling, that’s poor lead female trying to do what’s right and everyone else standing in her way just to stand her way. (BTW the male lead is supposedly bias against women, yet is supportive and admiring at times of the female lead and the best partner she’s ever had.)
The final straw is that a lot of stuff happens, but there is absolutely no sense of story. In 46 pages (2 chapters) there was almost no description. Not of the characters, not of the scene, or the city. The characters think and talk to each other all the time, everyone has conflicting opinions (adding to the feeling that the characters are not solid people, but whatever the author needs them to be to add a sense of tension to the story, which could be accomplished with some actual storytelling instead of a laundry list of dramatic elements.)
I can deal better with a story that goes nowhere but is beautifully told than I can with a book like this, which can’t seem to decide what its story, or characters, are.
So what gives? I still love Black Beauty just as much as I ever did, for its storytellying and precision description and charactization. I’ve enjoyed a number of older books, and have several that I reread often (like The Last Warrior Queen by I can’t see the author name from where I’m sitting).
Did I get a bad book, or are we just better storytellers now than we (by that I mean writers) were thirty years ago? Have the demands of the reader public, and of the business become higher over the years?
