Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2025 October 15 • Wednesday

While Robert McCammon’s The Wolf’s Hour was a devil-may-care romp through a werewolf fighting Nazis in WW2 story, combining men’s adventure and James Bondish sex and action conventions with enjoyably silly intrigue, bouncing back and forth between the 1940s timeline and our werewolf hero’s origins, Jeffrey Sackett’s Mark of the Werewolf takes aim at a similar target and misses completely.

Janos Kaldy is a werewolf who crosses paths with a neo-Nazi militant group in modern-day North Dakota. These members of the White Homeland Party, known as whips, are working seriously and with considerable diligence and effectiveness to start and win a race war and fulfill the aims of the Third Reich.

Werewolf lore here is different. Kaldy cannot be hurt or killed. Silver has no special power. He doesn’t eat or drink and neither does his body produce any waste products. He’s been alive for thousands of years, doesn’t remember much of his past, doesn’t even know what his original name was and only wants to die.

The only bit of werewolf legend that’s relevant here is wolfsbane. The flower weakens him and can be used to control him. Without it, he’s Superman and will break any chains, smash down any wall, etc. With the flowering plant, he’s Superman with Kryptonite, though he’s still invulnerable.

So, full moon, Kaldy kills a bunch of whips, they decide they need a werewolf because if they could get an army of Nazi werewolves together, that’d help their plans. They capture Kaldy pretty easily and then the reader spends hundreds of pages listening to really uninteresting and unconvincing characters talk and talk and talk.

There’s a character who’s a priest and a medical doctor, with the last name Neville, presumably for Neville Chamberlain, since he appeases and collaborates at every opportunity.

For exposition purposes Neville is also good enough at hypnosis to put Kaldy in trances and take him back in time, recovering buried memories and discovering that Kaldy had known Nostradamus and Merlin and been at the French Revolution and so on.

Interestingly, this novel was published about a year after the comic book Swamp Thing had taken its title character on a similar journey. Back then comics we’re hardly mainstream news but this one was. In one issue Swamp Thing was going to meet Jesus Christ but the president of DC Comics pulled the plug on it, causing writer Rick Veitch to quit in protest, thus creating a censorship controversy.

Does the werewolf Kaldy meet Jesus Christ? Yes, he does, more or less. I’m not sure if that’s a spoiler because by the time I got that far in the book I was finding it to be incredibly dull and tedious. I don’t recommend it.

There’s one decent twist and the epilogue gestures toward a cool idea for a werewolf book that, as far as I know, nobody has tried to write yet.

The first line is “The cold wind whipped through the naked trees, and the old woman pulled her heavy woolen shawl tight around her throat”.