Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2025 October 17 • Friday

I picked up this copy of Eric Sauter's Predators at a great used bookstore on Coney Island Ave, where there were hundreds of cheap paperbacks for sale.

It's not a werewolf novel, though I bought it hoping it was.

The story is a bit too long with too many characters and some serious pacing problems but it's good enough.

Dane was living in the Canadian wilderness with a bunch of wolves. Despite being human, he had become one of the pack and considered them his family.

Then a hunter named Van Owen brings four NYC professionals in a helicopter and they slaughter all the wolves, except for the alpha, an enormous black wolf.

And so Dane goes to NYC with the wolf to kill all of them, or, more precisely, to let the wolf kill them.

On the way he picks up a young woman named Jenny who's fleeing her mother's sadistic rapist boyfriend.

Also on the way we spend too much time with a cop named Yates and an animal control officer named Yates.

Van Owen is an insanely violent psychopath who enjoys kinky sex, gruesome murder and both of them at the same time. He's a great sleazy paperback villain with nothing about him that suggests a real person. But the idea is to build up to a big clash between Van Owen and… well, either Dane or the wolf or Jenny or Yates or Atwood or any combination.

Which is part of the problem. Always having to check in with all of these people works against the novel's having a sharp focus.

The set up is great, with Dane finding the wolves and then beginning his vendetta afer they get butchered.

And then there are a couple of good Central Park wolf murder scenes, after which things kind of get bogged down in to many extraneous details and bits of business.

The big showdown at the end is surprisingly unsatisfying and by the time I got to it I was kind of impatient for the book to be over.

But it's got enough going for it that it's worth reading. And there's even a reference to a voodoo goat sacrifice in Central Park, which I sort of hoped was a reference to Nicholas Condé's The Religion.

The first line is "The first time Dane saw the black wolf, it saved his life".