To Become A Werewolf

This is a strange little piece of my childhood that I finally managed to relocate.

Party of Awesome Campaign Platform

Good people, I am pleased to announce the first draft of my political platform. Here you will learn about the things I stand for, and the goals I will work towards if elected Emperor. Remember, a vote for Michael Mock is a vote for Awesome.

1. The Party of Awesome is comprehensively pro-bacon. We will work to reduce bacon prices, increase the national bacon supply, and improve bacon availability. However, we will not force bacon on anyone. (As the scriptures say, "The bacon which must be forced upon the tongue is not the true bacon.")

2. We can dance if we want to. Also, we can leave your friends behind - because your friends don't dance, and if they don't dance then they're no friends of mine.

3. The Party of Awesome also supports a clean energy initiative. Specifically, we intend to harness the limitless energy of America's toddlers by hanging cookies in front of treadmills. Our researchers assure us that will provide more than enough electricity for the foreseeable future, and also help wear the kids out so that they'll finally go to sleep at bedtime.

4. The Party of Awesome pledges to institute Zombie Defense Training initiatives in all public schools, and provide curriculum for private schools to use at their discretion. Additional programs to cover related threats such as lycanthropy and vampirism are still being developed.

5. We will abolish Daylight Savings Time, because it annoys me.

6. The Party of Awesome will work to implement laws (at either the State or Federal level) limiting the display of holiday decorations and the playing of holiday music to no more than three weeks before the relevant holiday. Also, anyone producing Christmas music will be required to create their own new melodies and lyrics, rather than recycling parts of older tunes.

So, fellow Americans: tell me what you think. What am I missing? What other burning issues should be included in our Awesome platform?

Character Sketches: Werdeth

Werdeth closes the car door and follows his uncle into the school. He's been to the school before, for meetings with counselors and administators; not when the other students were here. Not with all these people milling around, creating a sort of human log jam. Not with this overwhelming movement, these many scents blending and blurring.

A whisper of power stirs deep inside him, urging him to change, to flee, to run. He forces it down, along with the memories it brings: wind in his fur, fallen leaves and soil beneath his paws... blood in his mouth. He lost two years of his life the last time he let the beast run loose - lost them as far as the human world was concerned, anyway. He won't let that happen again.

Instead, he holds himself still while his uncle speaks to the secretary. It's probably unnecessary; he already has his schedule and his books. He could just go on to his classroom.

After a time his uncle glances back. "You'll be okay?" he asks.

Werdeth nods, recognizing it for the dismissal that it is. The office doors are glass; he can see the crowd outside, thinner now but still there. It frightens him, he realizes: the idea of being in middle of all that movement, all those people. Realizing that, he opens the door and steps out... into his first day of High School.

Why are they always carnivores? (2)

"Listen, I really do want to talk to you, but this is a really bad time." Jonah glanced at the clock on the wall. Seven-twenty. Jesus. He could all but feel the moon outside. Even with the windows closed and the blackout curtains drawn, it wouldn't be long before its influence became too much to resist.

"Oh." Lisa turned towards the apartment door, cup of sugar firmly in hand, then hesitated. "Listen, maybe we could..."

"Tomorrow... I swear, tomorrow, I'll call you and we can do anything you want to do." At any other time, Jonah would have been thrilled to have Lisa stop by. Her apartment was right across the way; she was bright and funny and undeniably attractive. Her timing, however, could not have been worse. He had to get her out of here.

"Okay," she said, brightening. She was obviously intrigued, and equally clearly didn't quite want to ask why he was so eager to get rid of her now. Good. She put her hand on the door, turned the knob, eased it open...

Too late. The first ripple of the change moved through him, doubling him over like a bad cramp. Lisa turned back, gasped, and hurried to his side.

He tried to wave her away. "No." She knelt beside him. "Get away. I don't want-" His jaw was already restructuring itself, and abruptly he could no longer speak. A moment later fur burst from his skin, a wave of dark brown grass growing impossibly fast.

Lisa backed away, gasping. Not like this, Jonah thought. Please, not like this. That was his last human thought.

Something touched Lisa's back, and she nearly screamed. Then she realized that she'd backed into the door. Jonah was gone, and she could only stand and stare at the beast that he had become: the long, powerful arms; the hooked claws; the animal snout; the cute little nose...

What, she thought, is that?

It took her a moment. The beast showed no interest in her at all. Instead, it turned away and lumbered across the carpet, raised itself up, and hooked one set of claws around the exercise bar that hung across the bedroom door. It raised itself up, slow and graceful. It was only once the creature was at rest, hanging easily from the bottom of the bar, that she was able to place it.

"Sloth," she said. "He's a weresloth." Her heart melted. As a man, Jonah was smart and kind. As a sloth, he was irresistibly cute as well. "Oh, I am totally keeping this one."

She slipped out the door and pulled it closed behind her, already plotting the details of their first date.

Book: Night of the Living Dead Christian

I just downloaded Night of the Living Dead Christian to my Kindle.

I'm not sure, at this point, whether or not to recommend it. It's Christian fiction - not my usual reading - but not entirely serious; its author describes it as a "farce." It's also set in a world of werewolves, vampires, and zombies. Since this is precisely the sort of metaphor and symbolism that I like to play with myself, I'm curious to see what the author's done with his monsters. Geds, over at Accidental Historian, has been been writing a not terribly positive review of it, and odds are that if it didn't work for him, it probably won't work for me, either.

However, the author[1] has also shown up in the comments on Geds' reviews, and he's... taking them in remarkably good spirits. He disagrees with Geds' assessment, of course, but his disagreement is calm, well-spoken, and gracious. (He also makes actual, specific points in his rebuttal: about what happens in the story, and how he thinks it works, and like that.) That was what tipped me over from "Eh, I'm curious but I don't think I'll buy it," to "You know what? Let's see what he wrote."

So Night of the Living Dead Christian is on my Kindle, and I'll start it as soon as I finish Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I'll probably post a little mini-review when I'm done.

[1] Apparently, at least. It's the Internet, so you never know, but I don't see any reason to doubt that he is who he claims to be.

Werewolf stories

It must be nearing Halloween, 'cause I've been thinking about one of my old, old characters. (From back in college, which was quite a while ago now.) This was back when essentially all of my characters were author-inserts - though if we're being honest, that's still kind of true - so he's about a sixteen or seventeen year old werewolf.

I'd been reading a lot of vampire fiction at the time, and decided to cast myself as a werewolf as a sort of protest. (Apparently I wasn't the only one thinking that way; at that point, every single werewolf book on the market had some version of "does for werewolves what Anne Rice did for vampires" on the cover.) This was before that sort of dark fantasy really hit the mainstream; nowadays there are quite a number of people writing the kinds of stories that I wanted to be writing back then.

I don't have a copy of the first story I wrote about him. This is not, from a strictly literary perspective, any great loss. The thinking behind the story is (at least for me) more interesting than the story itself was. I was basically comparing werewolves and vampires, and wondering why vampires seemed so much more popular. (That, again, is a lot less true now than it was back then.)

Looking at Dracula, I saw that vampires could change shape - into wolves, at that; also bats and mist. They could control the weather, and control animals, and and were enormously strong and fast. They could go out in daylight, too: they wouldn't have any powers, but they wouldn't be harmed, either. And the basic fascination with vampires seemed, to my mind, to be intimately tied up with their fundamentally predatory nature.

On that basis, there wasn't any obvious reason why a werewolf couldn't be equally compelling. Like vampires, they could only be killed in particular ways. (I hadn't yet learned that the vulnerability to silver was essentially a recent invention for movie-werewolves.) They were strong and fast and predatory; they didn't have as many shapeshifting options - wolves and wolfmen, usually - but they could probably do them any time they pleased; and if the vampires could control animals and weather, then the werewolves almost certainly could, too. The big mark against werewolves, as I saw it, was that Hollywood insisted on treating them like indestructible, furry serial killers - which was actually a pretty bland treatment of an idea which had a lot more potential.

I should also add that all of this was before White Wolf came out with Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse.

The character went through several different incarnations after that, but that was where he started. There's no real point to this, except that it's what I happened to be thinking about just now.

Because zombies are overdone...

We all know what the zombie apocalypse might look like. I mean, there are hundreds of movies exploring dozens of possibilities: fast zombies, slow zombies, zombies as an infectious outbreak, zombies where the world has changed and nobody stays dead, stupid zombies, smart zombies... zombies, zombies, zombies.

But there are plenty of other possibilities for a monster apocalypse that I think are... underexplored. Vampire apocalypse, for example. The classic is Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, which spawned at least three movies, including the recent Will Smith version, an older film with the same title, and The Omega Man (featuring Charlton Heston). The treatments differ a little, but the basic dynamics are the same: by night, the vampires hunt humans, and by day the humans hunt vampires.

That's far from the only possibility, though. What if the vampires have taken over because of the hypnotic abilities they're sometimes portrayed as having? What if they can come out in daylight? (In Bram Stoker's book, Dracula could move around just fine in daylight, he just didn't have any powers then and could be killed like a normal man.)

The one I'd really like to see, though, is a werewolf apocalypse. There are tons of possibilities here, and a lot of them depend on the nature of lycanthropy. I can easily picture a scenario, for example, where every full moon there are more of the beasts, and more people dead... but in the days between, you don't know who they are.

What if the infection changes you into a beast permanently? As a human, you'd end up facing off against a world of creatures that were fast, strong, relatively smart, and very hard to kill - oh, and they can follow your scent. Frankly, I'd rather fight vampires.