Kitty and the Silver Bullet, by Carrie Vaughn

Kitty and the Silver Bullet
Carrie Vaughn
2008


Now with her fourth offering Carrie Vaughn is about to bring Kitty Norville full circle. Once a timid and abused werewolf who was exiled from her hometown of Denver for standing up for herself; Kitty Norville is a successful radio host who (over the course of the last three books) has found herself some confidence and a way to live. Now Kitty’s mother is sick and Kitty must return to Denver. Denver means facing her former pack leader Carl.

What follows is a novel showing the transformation of Kitty Norville in the face of threats to her life and her family. What follows is Carrie Vaughn telling a damn good story while never once relenting and letting her characters off the hook. All of Vaughn’s characters pay for their actions and nothing is as simple as a “yes” or “no” decision. There are consequences to coming back to Denver, and not all of them involve werewolves. There are consequences for Kitty’s behavior towards her family, for having left Denver in the first place, for her romantic relationship with Ben, for Cormac being in prison, for standing up to Carl in the first place, for involving the police way back in the first book.

One thing is perfectly clear. The actions in Kitty and the Silver Bullet will have consequences in the next book and again they won’t be simple solutions. Carrie Vaughn has put Kitty in a very different place by the end of this book and while it feels like an ending (on one hand), it is only a beginning and Vaughn is sure to complicate Kitty’s life again.

I’ll be along for the ride.

Cycle of the Werewolf, by Stephen King

Cycle of the Werewolf
Stephen King
Land of Enchantment: 1984

A collection of twelve related vignettes about the small town of Tarker's Mills being threatened and attacked by a werewolf, though at first the townsfolk do not know this for sure. Cycle of the Werewolf is set up in short chapters, each focusing on a month of the year and the rise of the full moon which brings the return of the werewolf.

The first several chapters of this illustrated novel focus on the the attacks on random townspeople. The first several chapters feature the random townsperson discovering he or she is about to be attacked and then the werewolf strikes and at some point later a body is found.

It is only when Marty Coslaw is introduced that we are given the chance to have a storyline because Marty has seen the werewolf and lived. Marty is also a young boy confined to a wheelchair, but that does not stop him from wanting to stop the werewolf somehow.

Cycle of the Werewolf is, at its heart, a series of short glimpses into Tarker's Mills and the attacks of the werewolf. It is a brief novel, more a novella or novelette if we take the actual word count into consideration, and tells a decent enough story. If read by candlelight on the night of a full moon when the wind whips outside your window, I imagine Cycle of the Werewolf would be chilling enough. Because the short chapters feel almost unrelated for half the book, it was difficult for King to really build narrative and emotional heft. The ending is reasonably strong, but not enough to recommend Cycle of the Werewolf as something everybody must run out and buy (or borrow). That said, Cycle of the Werewolf is entertaining enough and short enough that it is a decent interlude between weightier King novels.

Had Roger Ebert not trademarked the use of thumbs in reviews, I would put mine firmly in the middle. Alas, he has and so I will not.