Review: The Cycle of the Werewolf

My feelings towards Stephen King's The Cycle of the Werewolf are probably the most mixed they've been all semester. If we were in a traditional classroom setting, I would probably keep my hand down until mid-lesson. Standing with my peers, I'd probably parry any inquiries with a, "Well, what did you think of it?"

I'm a King fan, I am. Not die-hard—The Cycle of the Werewolf makes four of his works that I've read, which for such a prolific author is a pretty meager percentage. Still, I've liked what I've read. A few of them, I've loved. The Shining and Carrie were two of my absolute favorites for a good couple years back in high school, though my shelves collected a few more over the years that I never got around to reading—Salem's Lot, Pet Sematary, The Stand—mostly gifts from my best friend, who swore by them.

What I liked about King? His style. Or tone. Or voice. One of the three. Or all of them. I'm still not sure I could identify which it was, despite having read Rick Hautala's essay on "The Hardest Three: Tone, Style, and Voice" in Writers Workshop of Horror this week. One thing was for sure, though: King's prose sucked me into those stories, never once jarring me with a, "Why'd you pick that word?" or an, "Is that really what you meant to say?"

Maybe it's my inner copyeditor going haywire with the freelance work I've been doing this week, but something about the prose in The Cycle of the Werewolf just felt... off. I checked to see if it had been published earlier—an older, more immature work, maybe—but no, it was published several years after four of the five novels I named above and the same year as Pet Sematary. Granted, it's been years since I last read King—maybe I'm just a pickier reader now. The point remains, though, that in almost every one of The Cycle of the Werewolf's twelve vignettes, I found myself frowning at the page, wondering if it could have been written differently.

I say almost all, because one section shone as a stand-out favorite. "July," the story of Marty Coslaw and his secret fireworks. I loved this section. I got so wrapped up in Marty's story that I honestly forgot at one point that there had ever been other characters. Maybe it's because Marty's section was longer, or because he was such a sympathetic kid—but I would be willing to place a (small) amount of money on a bet that there's something different in the tone of this chapter.

Take this section, for example:

"Don't be foolish," his mother tells him brusquely—she is often brusque with him, and when she has to rationalize this brusqueness to herself, she tells herself she will not spoil the boy just because he is handicapped, because he is going to spend his life sitting in a wheelchair.

The page continues with Marty's dad's "doodly-damn"–ing and the frank admission that Marty makes his dad nervous, followed by his sister's "delight" at the canceled fireworks (King, "July"). I'll use Hautala's definition of tone here—something about King's attitude towards his story has changed. Does King like Marty more than his other characters? I kind of get the sense that he does. He lavishes more detail on Marty's personal life and relationships than any other character, giving Marty more depth in a handful of paragraphs than any other character achieves in an entire chapter.

It's an important lesson to writers everywhere, I think. If you like your characters, your readers can tell. If you don't, or you're indifferent, they can tell that, too. Yes, Marty is the protagonist. He's the one who ultimately kills the Beast. But that doesn't mean that the other sections should come across like they just needed to be written for the sake of advancing the plot.

There were other things this story did well. That "advancing the plot" thing, for one. I was taking meticulous notes on how King built tension towards the story's climax. For the first two months, we have a character introduced and then murdered by the Beast. How boring would it have been if that pattern repeated for twelve months? In that sense, King doesn't disappoint. In subsequent stories we get a sense of the town's disquiet, disbelief falling away in the face of terror—for some residents, at least. We learn that the Beast is a town "regular" and that he's someone seemingly beyond suspicion. Then a moment of excitement—the first strike against the Beast!—midway through the year. It takes another three months before he's identified, but tensions build all the while as his patterns seem to have changed for the less-homicidal. In a twist, we get to see into the Beast's perspective in the penultimate chapter, and learn that he's capable of making moral choices after all—so do we still want him to die?? Finally, a resolution, with our brave, young protagonist killing his nightmare.

As a story, it's effective. As a writer, it's the perfect outline. Why bother trying to break apart The Wizard of Oz into a three-act structure when you've got The Cycle of the Werewolf so neatly partitioned?

So I suppose my conclusion is that I liked The Cycle of the Werewolf perhaps better as a teaching tool than as a work of fiction, per se. It was still a good story, especially once I got hooked on Marty's character, but all in all, not King's finest work. Would I recommend it? Sure, especially if you're a writer trying to amp up the tension in the middle of your manuscript. Just don't read it expecting a terrible scare.


Citations: King, Stephen. The Cycle of the Werewolf. Kindle ed., Gallery 13, 2019.

Hautala, Rick. "The Hardest Three: Tone, Style, and Voice." Writers Workshop of Horror, edited by Michael Knost, Woodland Press, 2010, pp. 91-99.