Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King

 

Timothy Sáenz

Cycle of the Werewolf Notes

RIG Monsters

MFA in Writing Popular Fiction – Spring 2021

Due Friday, Feb. 26, 2021

To my surprise, I enjoyed Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf. Previously, I had never completed a Stephen King novel. Everyone I had begun numbed me with a narcotizing tedium, and I soon realized I could skip 25, 30, 35 pages, resume the novel, and still feel like I was picking up where I had left off.

It was not so with Cycle of the Werewolf. King gets right into the action and moves on to the next kill, blaming Earth’s lady of the night for the lycan lunacy bestowed by her full moon beams. The first several chapters had the feel of vignettes, a series of self-contained killings that exemplified the weaknesses of the victims or their bad luck. A blizzard traps Arnie Westrum in a railroad tool shack nine miles out of town; love craver Stella Randolph sees romance where there isn’t any; Brady Kincaid loses track of time flying his new kite. They aren’t doing anything wrong, but they, like the others, are vulnerable.

Later, King knits the vignettes together around Marty Coslaw and his Uncle Al and provides a seamless thread to the end of the story.

What I enjoyed and marveled at the most were King’s characterizations and the imagery he employed, and it is those imagery-laced characterizations I want to make my own. With the Coslaws, for instance, King uses auditory imagery to shape and fill them. With Marty’s father, it’s his “Big Pal voice” and the dialog that accompanies it: “doodly-damn good”, “little bitty buddy”, and “hey! Hey!”; sister Katie leaning in close and hissing that Marty gets what he wants because he’s “a cripple”; his mom asks quick, shallow questions to which she knows the answers, “You, okay Marty?”, won’t look at his stick-like legs (a visual turn), and exits quickly. She is ashamed a cripple has emerged from her womb.

King throws in an auditory comic moment, too, when Herman hears the racket from the beast’s attack on his son, “’Who’s there, godammit?’ [h]is father [said], not sounding very much like a Big Pal.” I chuckled heartily!

King’s excellent characterizations made me think of some of my own, in particular the one of Matt in “The Tall Man”, a short story I submitted for the January residency. I returned to it and read it, immediately seeing how I could generate a more complete and consistent picture of him. Here is the tepid original:

Matt, on the other hand, was bored. He sat slumped – as best someone who is 6-6 can slump – in his chair, his arms folded. He just took in the conversation. He wasn't Catholic. In fact, he wasn't very religious, though his dad didn't know that. He didn't think he would be needed because, frankly, he didn't have any conviction about this possession stuff or whatever it was. He thought it was going to be a big fail. He didn't need to be told to keep the details of this "spiritual adventure", as his dad had called it, confidential: He was embarrassed to be part of it. He was here because he was the muscle, and he did not expect to be called on. How strong is someone who attacks a little girl? He hadn't heard or seen anything to alarm him, and he did not feel any "presence" of evil or even plain old, spooky paranormal activity. He wanted to get on with it and get outside. He was supposed to call Aliyah, and Aliyah had teased him with vague promises.

Hopefully, this amendment packs more punch but conveys most of the same ideas:

Matt was bored. His 6-6 frame slumped in his chair, which creaked under his 280 pounds, head tilted backward as if to pull him away from the table talk. The biceps on his folded arms bulged, as did his Popeye forearms, his hidden right hand clutching his cell phone. He wasn’t religious, though his dad didn’t know. He was supposed to be afraid of a spirit attacking a little girl? Give me something to hit! As a tackle on the local high school football team, he imagined pulling for a sweep, helmeted head turned down, thundering cleats tossing dirt and grass in their wake as he freight-trained along the line of scrimmage, laser eyes looking upfield for a linebacker to pancake. Aliyah loved it when her man pancaked another player. She teased Matt with vague promises before every game. The thought made him shift tensely. He wanted to possess her!

Please let me know if I made it better or worse and where I went wrong.

King uses the auditory senses to characterize Constable Neary – the boastful tone we hear, the proud words and phrases of his surefire method, his disdainful curses (“numbfuck”, “psycho-fucking-logical”), and the visuals of his “beefy” appearance. King paints a complete picture of a high school level doofus who is the kiddie cop he so resents.

Eye color is woven through the monster-making of Matheson, Pinborough, Barker, and King. The first three use red for evil and blood-lust; King uses a metamorphosis from yellow to yellow-green to green, perhaps to tell of the werewolf’s growing moral and physiological sickness or maybe just a reflection of the cycle of full moons. How deep the eyes are set or the number of eyes may aggravate the sense of hideousness, while a serpentine pupil adds to malevolence.

Barker and King use height to add impression, with Rawhead at a Goliathan nine feet tall and the beast at seven feet. They create dread with the size, length, and shape of an oversized head and jaws, and rows of sharp fangs or jagged, ripping teeth, omens of the consumption of raw human. Pinborough has taken the already icky spider and blown it up into nightmarish proportions – not as big as Rawhead or Rev. Lowe – but with its spindly legs, life-sucking cups, bobbling eye bank, and slow death cocoon, most people would rather get killed in one or two chomps or smashes.

Kudos to King for his great descriptions!