Quarrel with the Moon
By J.C. Conaway
1982 Tor Books
Paperback, 319 pages
What a pretentious fucking title
for a werewolf novel! But despite a few overly florid passages, the prose
doesn’t get too purple in this book and it’s really pretty darn good.
An anthropologist and his fashion
model girlfriend (!) travel to the mountains of West Virginia, he to study some
human-like bones found at a dig and she to try to rekindle their troubled
relationship. But ol’ Josh, the anthropologist, grew up on that there mountain
and it is a kind of homecoming for him as well. Naturally, their relationship
doesn’t improve with all of his kin in the way, and his kin are weird, and a little deformed. ..and a
little hairy. And then there are the bloody murders.
It should be noted that Josh and
Cresta, the model, are both pretty shitty people and it’s hard to root for or
feel bad for either of them. In fact, only Josh’s Aunt Avvie has a decent soul.
But this is a horror novel, and we only want blood, guts and incestuous family
relations, and there is plenty of that to go around. It’s kind of a long book but it reads quickly
and doesn’t get boring, even when the characters do incredibly dumb and
frustrating things. There are plenty of twists and reveals along the way to keep
you pleasantly satisfied.
It’s
pretty easy to guess some of what is going to happen, but Conaway (who seems to
be primarily a romance author) keeps it moving at a good pace and writes well
enough for you to admire the story’s construction and telling. And some of it
gets batshit crazy, pushing this one into “recommended” territory.
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