The Wolf Gift is a present for Anne Rice fans

THE WOLF GIFT

By Anne Rice

Knopf, $25.95

There’s a wolf glaring out from the cover of this book (although you wonder why it doesn’t have blue eyes, but more about that later), so you know it’s a werewolf novel. You also know someone’s going to get bitten. Rice is hardly a coy writer. She presents her victim on the very first page.

At 23, Reuben Golding has it all. He’s the son of prominent and well-to-do San Francisco family. His father is an English professor. His mother is a surgeon. His brother is a priest. Reuben is blindingly handsome and resoundingly healthy. He’s smart. He’s tall, well over six feet. He has a beautiful girlfriend who is a lawyer.

Only the big “R” is missing — Respect. None of his family respects him, except his father. Their pet names for him all contain the word “boy.”

“‘Sunshine Boy,’ as his girlfriend Celeste always called him. ‘Little Boy’ according to his brother, Fr. Jim. And ‘Baby Boy,’ according to his mother, who still called him that in front of people. Only his dad called him Reuben and saw only him when their eyes met.”

Predictably, he doesn’t want to do what his mother wants him to do: become a doctor. He takes a degree in English instead, and winds up working at a newspaper just to get his name in print. He does all sorts of stories, and it’s a real estate piece that takes him up the Northern California coast to the home of Marchent Nideck, an “elegant older woman.” She’s in her late 30s.

The house and property are for sale. The house is something out of Dark Shadows. “The huge old house was wintery with deep slate roofs and diamond-pane windows. It was built of rough-faced stone, and had countless chimneys rising from its steep gables, and a sprawling conservatory on the west side, all white iron and glass.”

Reuben loves the house. Marchent is equally attractive to him. He will spend the night in the house with her so that he can work on his story the next day. Boy and girl stuff is inevitable, but after that is out of the way, and they are in bed asleep, Reuben is awakened by the sound of glass breaking. He hears a scream and rushes down to find Marchent under attack by intruders. They injure her and hurt Rueben too, and he is afraid he will be killed when, suddenly, the attackers are attacked.

“A sudden torrent of sounds exploded in the shadowy hallway. It had to be the deep roaring growls of a fierce dog. His attackers were screaming, the animal was snapping, roaring, and Reuben himself had slid down in what was surely his own blood.”

The intruders are no match for the animal, but then it turns on Reuben and bites him too. It’s no dog, as every reader already knows, and the bite isn’t fatal, also no surprise. What follows for Reuben is a trip to the hospital and a miraculous recovery from his injuries, but also some troubling changes in him too.

There’s not even a full moon.

That little bit of werewolf lore is not the only one that Rice discards in this story. She’s aware of the legendary link between the moon’s phases and werewolf’s transformations, she acknowledges it, says it isn’t true and that’s that.

Just as her famous vampires were not your grandpa’s Nosferatu, these werewolves are modern cell-phone carrying lycanthropes. Oh yes, they grow huge when they transform and become instantly powerful, are covered in thick fur and sport canine snouts and big fangs and claws. Yet they are still able to speak and reason as well as they could as humans. They just lust after a kill but don’t kill just anything.

While they like to kill humans, these are Dexteresque werewolves who feed only on evil humans. In fact, they are unable to harm innocent people. They are not completely bestial and retain much of their humanness, like their eye color. Reuben has blue eyes, even in his werewolf form. That’s Rice’s genius. Her vampires were like souped-up humans. They had great powers and lived for centuries, but they were plagued with doubts and unhappiness. These new werewolves of Rice’s have great powers and live for centuries and are plagued by existential questions.

They are a new kind of creature in Rice’s menagerie, but they have some of the same issues. At times, it’s downright soap opera-like and will remind you of that other werewolf/vampire series set in a Northwest location amongst the redwoods and rain.

More is going on here than romantic animism, however. Rice had a much-publicized epiphany after the death of her husband, Stan, and decided to write about Christian subjects. The result was a memoir, Called Out of Darkness, about her faith experience, and two book written in the voice of Christ, Called Out of Egypt and The Road to Cana. After years as describing herself as an atheist, Rice “officially” returned to the Roman Catholic Church in 1998. The church proved too intolerant of Rice’s beliefs about homosexuality and other issues, however, and in 2004, she again renounced her formal religion.

“For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else,” Rice wrote on her website. She gives voice to some of those same doubts and pangs of conscience in The Wolf Gift.

When the werewolves kill a large animal in a hunt, it turns its eyes to the sky, as if begging for help. Rice, as anonymous narrator, writes “Woe to you, all living things that appeal to such a heaven for help.” Some characters in the book flirt with a pantheistic philosophy in which they and all things in the universe are part of a God being.

There are references to religion and philosophy scattered through the book. Those won’t slow down even the most disinterested reader because, make no mistake, this is Anne Rice writing and she is a very good storyteller, much better than the legion of imitators who have cashed in on the current vampire craze.

What’s different about these creatures is their awareness of their own situation and their confidence in their own control of their fates. The werewolves’ actions are informed by a higher good, and that is what constrains them from killing innocents even as they gorge on the flesh of predators. It’s a well-told tale, but even as Rice creates this universe apart, she raises as many questions as she answers about werewolves. Savvy readers know that answers to those questions will come in future werewolf books.