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.