Elliot wakes up, drugged and badly wounded, in a plywood room next to the body of his human girlfriend, his fur soaked with her blood. A devilish voice mocks and taunts him from the shadows. For a moment, he’s balanced on the blade of despair.
But werewolves are survivors, and Elliot is stronger than he thinks. Instead of falling into madness, he decides to peel back the artifice behind his gruesome situation and uncover what his memory has lost. As his strength returns by degrees, so does his determination – and a cruel game master will discover how little he knows about Elliot’s people.
Two films were released a week apart in late December 1997: “An American Werewolf in Paris” and “Titanic.” Since I was interested in both films, it gave me the opportunity for my own little Barbenheimer, and the result was this story.
For a while, I ran a website called “The Half-Million” that served much the same function as the Patreon – a repository for stories that had nowhere else to go. “An American Werewolf on the Titanic” was one of those stories. It lived there for a couple of years, until I dismantled the site in favor of actually trying to get stuff published.
Last year, while doing an extensive audit on nearly forty years of writing, I found the Half-Million on an old hard drive, complete and intact. With the Patreon up and running and begging for new material, the Half-Million was a potential treasure trove of content – if the 25-year-old stories were any good. Somehow, I got the giggles when I read the title “An American Werewolf on the Titanic,” and just had to give it a look.
The story was pretty much exactly what it says on the tin – a wealthy werewolf (an ancestor of Benedict Kindernacht, protagonist of the Amanda K stories) travels first-class on the Titanic with his assistant and partner Walter Moskowitz. Ship hits iceberg, and Kindernacht, unwilling to let his partner freeze in the cold waters of the Atlantic, transforms him as the ship goes down, the better that they might survive the tragedy. It didn’t have much to say about class and culture and having our passengers ride first-class seemed a way to avoid certain inconveniences, nothing more.
Clearly, the story was due for a rewrite.
Over the next several weeks, I wrote feverishly on an aging laptop with 26 open browser tabs and a ream of research, trying to create a Titanic that wasn’t a borrowed vision from a 1990s filmmaker. Since the movie, everyone’s an expert, so I knew I’d get letters if I had so much as a bolt out of place. I had blueprints and layouts, pictures and portraits, costumes and props. And I made the ship itself problematic to its two illicit passengers; to Miles, a symbol of the conquest of nature; to Walter, a symbol of the structures that destroyed his life. A story that begins as pastiche ends the only way a story about the Titanic can end.
The story is one of the longer ones I’ve posted to Patreon, the longest story at the $3 tier, and free-to-read until March 26. It all begins here, April 11, 1912 – with the ship in Cobh Harbor and two crates that do not contain marble statues.
As a werewolf, Gabriel Blaine is a formidable attorney who has done great things to secure the future of his people. But the robust appetite of a werewolf fares poorly when tempted by the plentiful food of humans. At 385 pounds (174 kg), Gabriel’s weight is starting to affect his robust lycanthropic health, leaving him with no choice but to take a sabbatical and rejoin the Carver Gore Pack for the summer, where the food is considerably harder to catch. His return to his people is marked with high celebration.
But, at his weight and nearly sixty years old, Gabriel finds keeping up with the pack impossible, and the judgment of his companion uncomfortable. With long hot days turning into unexpected struggles, Gabriel is torn between returning to Ashton Mills in ignominious failure, or steeling himself against his own weaknesses and proving his continued value to his people.
The three-part “Thou Shalt Not…” comes to an end, dependent on whether Harris Baker can let go of his vendetta. Astute readers might notice that the timeframe is a bit compressed; the events of the story really wouldn’t happen that quickly, but Baker’s bad decisions seem to hustle things along. Meanwhile, Simon is well on his way to discovering who he really is, and finding a family strong enough for him.
“The Way I Lived, Out Here With You” is this week’s free story, about a werewolf struggling to end a difficult period of mourning for the sake of a loved one. How do you move on without feeling like you’re abandoning those you’ve lost?
I wrote “Hot” in the dead of winter, coldest day of the year, with the wind howling outside the windows and the thermometer reading 8F. I was thinking about how my earlier complaining about the snow and cold would soon give way to complaining about the suffocating summer heat, giving the impression that one could never be truly satisfied with the weather.
The story went a long way toward cementing the Tribe as a running series; after writing it, I edited older stories to match its setting. The town of Ashton, Maine, a former mill village with a population of around 9,600, puts in its first appearance, 24 miles from Carver Cabin in Carver Gore, the territory of the Tribe and the 152 werewolves who call its dozen or so square miles of unincorporated land their home. The Tribe’s leader, called simply “The Master,” is a young visionary celebrated throughout the Pack for his problem-solving skills, though the people remain largely ungoverned. The Pack’s freedom is partly due to the legal maneuvering of Gabriel Blaine, a member of the Pack who passed the bar and created a non-profit trust granting the Pack stewardship of Carver Gore.
The werewolves of the Tribe are an indolent, goofy lot, though they do have the ability to lock-in when one of their own is in danger, and they have little tolerance for hostile humans. “Hot” asks a lot of its two protagonists: what do you do next when you’ve achieved your greatest dream? When does ennui turn into depression? How do you encourage someone else to take the reins of your life? And is the problem really just the heat, or is it something deeper? As Breakwater and Patrick stumble out of the woods on their fool’s quest to briefly join civilization, they’re confronted by their neglect of a part of themselves as beautiful as any beast.
The Wolf Writer: Ben Goodridge dot com 