Post by komodo on Jan 22, 2012 8:42:38 GMT -5
She is not. Not in this case.
Love it or hate it (and trust me, I frakking hate it) Anne Rice completely changed the way people look at vampires with her Vampire Chronicles series. What were once feared monsters of legend, undead night stalkers who devoured and destroyed all that they touched became...well...this.
Which without a doubt opened the floodgates for this:
Look what her madness has bred!
When I heard she was going to write a book about werewolves, I became almost violently ill, vomiting with rage in between fits of hysterical laughter. Because I knew her history, and I know what is "in" when it comes to werewolf literature. I am glad to see that she has proven me right. The title of her novel, The Wolf Gift, and the photoshopped pair of wolf eyes on the cover should tell you all you need to know. The ever enlightening werewolves.com, which is a site I check only for irony (I go to werewolf-news for all the good werewolf updates) provided a recent interview with Anne Rice in which she pretty flatly lays out the mythology of her werewolves.
And it is at once everything I expected from her after slogging through her vampire books and strangely familiar.
Stripping monsters of what makes them monsters and turning them into objects of worship is par for the course as far as Rice in concerned. She has made a name for herself by destroying the popular image of the vampire and replacing it with fangirl bait. I loathe what she has done, but I accept that the damage is now irreversible and vampires will never be allowed to be vampires again and any attempt to make them as such is meant with scorn. I am slowly coming to the same acceptance when it comes to werewolves.
But this...this is just lazy.
Anne Rice started a trend, and I'll admit that it was original. The idea of a more sympathetic take on vampires was a novel one at the time. Now it is all anyone does. But the...fad has now spread to werewolves. And it has already taken hold, for about a decade now. It began with White Wolf and their World of Darkness series and has since spiraled out of control. The idea of werewolves transforming into beautiful, angelic lupines at will and having full control over themselves at all times has been done. Now it's all over the place, and the reemergence of Freeborn, the ultimate expression of the domesticated cuddlewolf, it seems that there is no escape from the eternal cloud of ultimate sucking that is the paranormal romance cancer.
That she seems to think that her book is original is nothing less than skin peelingly annoying.
I was going to give her book a chance, at the off chance that there actually be some real good storytelling involved. She is not a terrible writer, no matter how despicable I find her mythologies. This interview, complete with the requisite sly sideways bashing of werewolf films and literature that portray werewolves as monsters has put me off of buying it.
Love it or hate it (and trust me, I frakking hate it) Anne Rice completely changed the way people look at vampires with her Vampire Chronicles series. What were once feared monsters of legend, undead night stalkers who devoured and destroyed all that they touched became...well...this.
Which without a doubt opened the floodgates for this:
Look what her madness has bred!
When I heard she was going to write a book about werewolves, I became almost violently ill, vomiting with rage in between fits of hysterical laughter. Because I knew her history, and I know what is "in" when it comes to werewolf literature. I am glad to see that she has proven me right. The title of her novel, The Wolf Gift, and the photoshopped pair of wolf eyes on the cover should tell you all you need to know. The ever enlightening werewolves.com, which is a site I check only for irony (I go to werewolf-news for all the good werewolf updates) provided a recent interview with Anne Rice in which she pretty flatly lays out the mythology of her werewolves.
And it is at once everything I expected from her after slogging through her vampire books and strangely familiar.
4) You mentioned in earlier interviews that one difference in "The Wolf Gift" from other werewolf stories will be the fact that the man-wolf, Reuben, will retain his sense of himself before, during and after the transformation. Why was it important for you to change this basic element of the werewolf story?
I simply couldn't get interested in the werewolf of film and story who goes rabidly wild as a werewolf and remembers nothing of what he did the next day. Those old werewolf films present the transformation as a curse, and as pointless. The werewolf shreds his victims indiscriminately and doesn't even seem to enjoy it. He certainly doesn't feed on them. And then he's back in the human body hearing about what he did. Where can one go with that old formula? Right to a tragic finish with a silver bullet. ----- I had to explore the idea of a Man Wolf loving the transformation itself, and being entirely conscious as he experiences it, loving the feel of the wolf coat growing out of his skin, loving the newfound strength to climb walls, vault over rooftops, etc, and loving the fact that he can smell the evil of his victims. Reuben of course experiences tremendous changes as the result of the "gift" but he is still Reuben, trying to figure things out, reflecting on what he's done and whether or not he can ever get it under control. I need a fully conscious hero. I need a hero capable of wrestling with contradictions. As I explored all this many revelations came to me --- that in the wolfen state Reuben was neither animal nor human, but an enhanced combination of the two. He possesses the cunning of a human being, with the immense strength and compulsion to act of a beast. Now, that's exciting to me. The Man Wolf has the potential to be a hero.
5) What other changes have you made to the original legend of the werewolf?
Right off, I eliminated the idea of the full moon controlling Reuben's transformation. That was key. I wanted a wholly new cosmology and origin story. The old werewolf material is magical, rather like the old vampire material. Vampires cannot be near garlic, cannot endure the sight of a cruxifix, must be in a coffin with their native soil in it, etc. The old werewolf changes during the full moon, remembers nothing. Well, I couldn't work with those limitations. If you introduce that kind of magic, the universe of the novel is too structured, too limited. I wanted Reuben wrestling with scientific questions about what's happening to him, what do hormones have to do with it, can it be controlled by strong will, etc. Of course he wonders if he is part of a moral plan, and if so, what that means. He can smell evil and he asks himself why that is. Is there a simple physical explanation for picking up the scent of the malicious, or it is this a moral given, and if so who has given him the power? To me that is the kind of complexity that makes a revival of the old classic horror monsters possible. But every author of supernatural novels today works out his or her own cosmology. The biggest change I've made, of course, is to see the transformation as a gift. Some werewolf films do speak of the "change" as a gift, but ultimately they play it out as a curse. For Reuben it is much more a gift than a curse.
I simply couldn't get interested in the werewolf of film and story who goes rabidly wild as a werewolf and remembers nothing of what he did the next day. Those old werewolf films present the transformation as a curse, and as pointless. The werewolf shreds his victims indiscriminately and doesn't even seem to enjoy it. He certainly doesn't feed on them. And then he's back in the human body hearing about what he did. Where can one go with that old formula? Right to a tragic finish with a silver bullet. ----- I had to explore the idea of a Man Wolf loving the transformation itself, and being entirely conscious as he experiences it, loving the feel of the wolf coat growing out of his skin, loving the newfound strength to climb walls, vault over rooftops, etc, and loving the fact that he can smell the evil of his victims. Reuben of course experiences tremendous changes as the result of the "gift" but he is still Reuben, trying to figure things out, reflecting on what he's done and whether or not he can ever get it under control. I need a fully conscious hero. I need a hero capable of wrestling with contradictions. As I explored all this many revelations came to me --- that in the wolfen state Reuben was neither animal nor human, but an enhanced combination of the two. He possesses the cunning of a human being, with the immense strength and compulsion to act of a beast. Now, that's exciting to me. The Man Wolf has the potential to be a hero.
5) What other changes have you made to the original legend of the werewolf?
Right off, I eliminated the idea of the full moon controlling Reuben's transformation. That was key. I wanted a wholly new cosmology and origin story. The old werewolf material is magical, rather like the old vampire material. Vampires cannot be near garlic, cannot endure the sight of a cruxifix, must be in a coffin with their native soil in it, etc. The old werewolf changes during the full moon, remembers nothing. Well, I couldn't work with those limitations. If you introduce that kind of magic, the universe of the novel is too structured, too limited. I wanted Reuben wrestling with scientific questions about what's happening to him, what do hormones have to do with it, can it be controlled by strong will, etc. Of course he wonders if he is part of a moral plan, and if so, what that means. He can smell evil and he asks himself why that is. Is there a simple physical explanation for picking up the scent of the malicious, or it is this a moral given, and if so who has given him the power? To me that is the kind of complexity that makes a revival of the old classic horror monsters possible. But every author of supernatural novels today works out his or her own cosmology. The biggest change I've made, of course, is to see the transformation as a gift. Some werewolf films do speak of the "change" as a gift, but ultimately they play it out as a curse. For Reuben it is much more a gift than a curse.
Stripping monsters of what makes them monsters and turning them into objects of worship is par for the course as far as Rice in concerned. She has made a name for herself by destroying the popular image of the vampire and replacing it with fangirl bait. I loathe what she has done, but I accept that the damage is now irreversible and vampires will never be allowed to be vampires again and any attempt to make them as such is meant with scorn. I am slowly coming to the same acceptance when it comes to werewolves.
But this...this is just lazy.
Anne Rice started a trend, and I'll admit that it was original. The idea of a more sympathetic take on vampires was a novel one at the time. Now it is all anyone does. But the...fad has now spread to werewolves. And it has already taken hold, for about a decade now. It began with White Wolf and their World of Darkness series and has since spiraled out of control. The idea of werewolves transforming into beautiful, angelic lupines at will and having full control over themselves at all times has been done. Now it's all over the place, and the reemergence of Freeborn, the ultimate expression of the domesticated cuddlewolf, it seems that there is no escape from the eternal cloud of ultimate sucking that is the paranormal romance cancer.
That she seems to think that her book is original is nothing less than skin peelingly annoying.
I was going to give her book a chance, at the off chance that there actually be some real good storytelling involved. She is not a terrible writer, no matter how despicable I find her mythologies. This interview, complete with the requisite sly sideways bashing of werewolf films and literature that portray werewolves as monsters has put me off of buying it.
) but she seems to be a legitimate author who presented us with a variation on a theme. I don't like the Rice-ian subgenre either but you can't really blame her for it catching on in mainstream media.
