Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
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2024 October 16 • Wednesday

The Howling is a very well known werewolf movie. It's based on a novel by Gary Brandner, which is extremely different. The two share only the basic premise, which is itself a spoiler and so won't be mentioned here.

The novel was first published as a Gold Medal paperback in 1977, which would make it one of the very last of the Gold Medals. The Gutbrain library always has room for another one and The Howling is in the stacks now.

The movie has a lot more going on in it than the book does. The novel starts out with a mysterious account of mass violence in a small European village 400 years ago. Then it jumps to present-day Los Angeles and a brutal rape scene whose consequences include loss of pregnancy for Karyn, the victim.

In an attempt to recover from this trauma, Karyn and her husband Roy leave the city for a small, remote town called Drago.

If you've seen the movie The Howling, then you know where this is going. But the path the book takes is quite different and involves, among other things, werewolf sex and lesbian nuns.

One thing the book does better is the procurement of silver bullets. This is both witty and informative in the book. The movie's handling of this same problem is way too much of a coincidence/miracle but is admittedly fun and created some screen time for beloved actor Dick Miller.

Certainly The Howling is an exploitative novel—that's practically Gold Medal's mission statement—but it's interesting to see how much more complex the story was made for its movie adaptation. And Brandner has some very effective suspense and horror writing in here.

The first line is “In the dark Arda forest on the border between Greece and Bulgaria there is a dead gray patch of land roughly one mile square where no one goes and nothing lives”.