When the full moon
shines, a paralysing fear descends on the isolated Maine town of Tarker
Mills. No one knows who will be attacked next, but snarls that sound
like human words can be heard and all around are the footprints of a
monster whose hunger cannot be sated.
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Cycle of the Werewolf is a fun, quick read filled with abrupt chapters which cover a few pages a month (a moon). It's a mixture between graphic novel, children's book, and adult horror story. The writing is simple for any age to understand, but the graphics are quite bloody when they need to be while staying within a publishable, mainstream rating.
It's not a big brainer book; the almost child-like flow is comic pulp style, but each section has more text than imagery and cannot be called a straight graphic novel. Since the story is so spread out, it's choppy, and several of the chapters are told through different points of view, keeping it a little disconnected. The suspense scenes written during some of the kills were wound pretty tightly, and the violence was displayed well enough with the nifty graphics.
It's not like anything else King has written, and from what I understand it was originally meant to be a calendar, where a different part of the story was read each month. There's no way I would have been able to not read the entire calendar when I bought it if it were sold in that form! With the writing style, it doesn't feel like King at all to me. I think this is because he had to keep the writing short, simple, and bare-bones.
While it's an enjoyable enough book to read and fun to own for it's content, illustrations, and who it's by, the story is not a deep werewolf novel at all. It's format is simple and in many ways it grows dull at times, there is no tension that ties the tense scenes together as well as I would have liked. The little boy was of course the focus character but the ending revelation with him felt slightly anti-climactic.
The graphics are nicely done, pencil like drawings with defined detail but without deep color.
I haven't seen the movie this inspired for years (Silver Bullet) and forgot just about everything about it. This graphic novel inspires me to revisit it.
Trailer:
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