Yeah, this post is inspired by the previews for New Moon, but when I got to thinking about it, it really goes much deeper, and much further back than the latest boy jailbait flick based on Stephanie Meyer’s books. The question is this: Should the transformation from human to wolf be painful?

Going back to Universal’s first werewolf movie, Werewolf of London (1935), the transformation was not a painful process. In fact, Dr. Glendon didn’t even seem to notice it. He walked behind one pillar as a man and emerged a little hairier, and continued that way until he was a man-wolf. Six years later, in Universal’s much more successful film The Wolf-Man, Larry Talbot did have to remain still for the transformation, but it didn’t cause him any pain.

It really wasn’t until An American Werewolf in London and The Howling (both from 1981) that we see the transformation as something painful. Is it just because special effects finally allowed filmmakers to show the stretching flesh and bone contortions? Maybe. But I think there’s something more to it.

I think we began coming to terms with the werewolf as a metaphor. Going all the way back to Little Red Riding Hood, the werewolf stood in for a lecherous man who would lead innocent young girls astray. In the 1980s I think we moved away from the idea of the werewolf as a creature made by Satan and looked at him as something within ourselves, as with Robert Louis Stephenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The werewolf became an externalization of our repressed primal instincts and desires, namely rage and lust. This was especially true in The Howling, where the werewolves loved being lycanthropes. They relished having sex and killing as animals.

After the two films from 1981, most werewolf movies eshewed plot and focused on the transformation and killing for a long time. The best exception (prior to Ginger Snaps) being Neil Jordan’s 1984 The Company of Wolves, which is all about the werewolf as metaphor for our own dark side. Ginger Snaps (2000) did get back to plot and the werewolf as metaphor, but the metaphor in this case was the transformation caused by puberty, and Ginger’s transformation happened slowly and didn’t seem to cause her much (if any) physical pain … if you don’t count where the tried to cut off her tail.

So, should the transformation cause pain? If you’ve read my books, you know my answer is definitely Yes. The werewolf is opening an internal doorway, shedding the trappings of centuries of civilization to become something that is absolutely UNcivilized. He is becoming something wild and deadly. Sloughing off thousands of years of humanity should hurt, just as it should hurt to put them back on. Not to mention the logical implications of physically changing from a human shape to a wolf as we’ve been seeing from 1981 on.

Which, of course, brings us back to New Moon and Meyer doing to werewolves what the did to vampires in Twilight. Do the characters feel pain when they transform? Nope. In fact, thanks to CGI, they’re changing shape in mid-air in fractions of a second. There’s no payment for what they become, no dark side. Well, nothing darker than the brooding of a James Dean-esque bad guy (and forgive me, but I always saw Dean as just a crybaby). As with the “vegetarian” vampires, Meyer wants to turn monsters into misunderstood outcasts who don’t really want to hurt anyone, and that just isn’t what the werewolf (or vampire) is all about.

The technology to show the werewolf transformation as the painful release of our internal animal is ours. The question now is whether or not we’ve become so politically correct that we can no longer acknowledge that we have this monster living inside of us.

For centuries wolves have been hunted, persecuted, and reviled by many as monsters. They have been hunted to near extinction in several countries, including the mainland United States. On the other extreme, people have often taken wolves or wolf hybrids and tried to domesticate them, only to realize they can’t really care for a large pet. Somebody needed to step up and help educate the public about the true nature of the wolf, and provide a home for those cast-off hybrids that are neither wolf nor dog. That somebody was Mission: Wolf of Westcliffe, Colo.

Last summer I worked with Gabrielle Faust to raise money for Mission: Wolf and The Bat Sanctuary of Austin, Texas, at a joint book signing. It was a success, but I want to do more, and I’m hoping you’ll want to help … and possibly win a nice prize. So, my annual Give the Gift of Lycanthropy campaign this year is designed to help the good folks of Mission: Wolf provide care for the animals they’ve taken in.

Here’s how it works. On the left side of my Web site there is a donation button. By clicking it, you can donate money to Mission: Wolf through me. When the contest closes, I’ll send Mission: Wolf a check for everything donated. I’m not keeping any of the money for processing, to pay for the prizes, or anything like that. Every penny will be sent to Mission: Wolf.

Prizes? Yup. The person who donates the most money at www.stevenewedel.com between now and Christmas (Dec. 25, 2009) will receive one of my “PC” numbered copies of Little Graveyard on the Prairie. This is a small collector’s edition book that retails for $50 and was limited to a print run of 100 hardback copies. Here’s a link to Horror-Mall’s listing for the book. Now, because it is a rather expensive prize, the minimum donation to be qualified to win it is $10. You can donate as many times as you want. Your cumulative amount as of Dec. 25, 2009, will determine your eligibility for this grand prize. Remember, the money goes to Mission: Wolf.

If that’s too steep for you, don’t worry. You still have a couple of chances to win a free book. Everyone who donates any amount at all at www.stevenewedel.com will have his name put into a drawing to win his choice of one of my Scrybe Press titles.

But wait! There’s more. Everyone who reposts this message and sends comments/replies here with the working link (or includes me in the Facebook note) will also be entered into a drawing for a free Scrybe Press title from me.

That’s THREE chances to win. Plus, everyone wins that warm, furry feeling you get from helping some majestic animals and the wonderful people who take care of them. You can’t beat that with a dead vampire! Go to www.stevenewedel.com and click the Donate Now button in the upper left corner to help Mission: Wolf.

I hope you have a great holiday season, and thanks for your support!

One of the most popular pages on any of my Web sites is the one where I posted the spell on how to become a werewolf. I can especially see it spike when a popular new book or movie involving werewolves is set to come out. The last Underworld movie, for instance, brought a lot of traffic, and with New Moon coming soon, things are heating up again. Why? What is it about becoming a werewolf that inspires people to want to be one?

I think there are basically two main reasons people want the Gift of Lycanthropy. The first is the same thing that drove Dr. Jekyll to find Mr. Hyde — the desire to tap into an alter ego and perform actions that won’t be associated with our “real” personality. These actions could be as benign as simply finally ignoring the homeless guy at the underpass and not giving him our last dollar, to actually eating him. Either way, it’s because we feel like there is something else inside of us, and sometimes we don’t want to be polite. Sometimes we want to show our fangs and chase poeple away. Sometimes we just want to do bad things because we’re tired of being held back by The Man, The Spouse, or whatever it is repressing us.

Then there’s the feeling that we’ve become soft living in civilization. We want to “get back to nature” in a way that Thoreau never imagined. We don’t want to lie on our belly and watch the ants work, we want to actually become a part of nature, to run with the speed of the wolf, smell the woods with heightened senses, hear the gurgling of streams and sit out with our pack at night and sing to the moon without worrying about someone sending us to the loony bin.

That’s what I think. What about you? Why do you think the werewolf has remained so alluring for so many centuries?

“Drink from me and live forever.”

Remember that? It’s the tag line from the film adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. I’ve been shopping for a poster from that movie to hang in my classroom and seeing that tag line again reminded me of why the vampire was so scary for so long.

Then I came across this news story yesterday and got to thinking about the response I got to teaching parts of the Bible in my Advanced Placement English class last year.

I offer for your consideration the theory that today’s readers are the most self-absorbed and ignorant since the invention of movable type.

I taught parts of the Bible to these seniors so they would be able to recognize allusion in other works of literature. I was amazed at how little they know about the book that has been the cornerstone of Western culture for 2,000 years. (Keep in mind, not all of them were ignorant, but the majority knew very little about Christianity.)

“Drink from me and live forever.” Readers who only know vampirism through reading Stephanie Meyer, L.J. Smith and others in that vein likely don’t see the horror in that statement. Living forever? Sounds great, right? Me, me, me. I get to live forever. I get to be different than everyone around me.

But when you look at that line as the allusion it is and recognize what it really means, there’s a dark side to immortality. In the Gospels, Christ tells his disciples the wine of the Last Supper is his blood. He also says anyone who accepts him as the Son of God will have eternal life in Heaven.

For centuries the horror of the vampire was that it was a perversion of this promise from Christ. Drink from the vampire and you’ll live forever, yes, but you’ll forever be confined to the flesh and this world and have to feed on others. You’ll be cut off from God, from all that is holy and light. That’s why the crucifix and holy water were effective weapons against the vampire.

Based on what I saw in my AP class, and what I’ve learned talking to dozens of other readers of the new young adult vampire novels, I’ve come to believe the modern generation is woefully under read and they don’t seem to care. It’s better, they believe, that vampires are “vegetarians” that only feed on animals (because it’s okay to completely redefine a word despite its etymology, too) and that they offer not damnation but eternal romantic devotion. Physical death and a broken heart are the only real fears when you are this shallow.

DISCLAIMER 1: I realize some of you are not Christian and maybe because of that you see no problem with the younger generation not being familiar with the Bible stories. As I told my students, whatever your religious beliefs, I think it’s important you understand the principals that helped to establish the culture in which we live.

DISCLAIMER 2: Yes, this site is supposed to be about werewolves, and if I’m going to bash Meyer and her ilk I should focus on what she did to the werewolves. Maybe later.

DISCLAIMER 3: The good thing about young readers is that they are young and still have time to discover the literature that has stood the test of time. Despite what sounds like pessimism and disgust, I do have hope for them.

A couple of weeks ago another teacher told me I’d been written up in The Current, an alternative newspaper published in Tahlequah, Okla. Roxann Rumor Perkins’s piece isn’t really a review, but it is all about Murdered by Human Wolves. She never says if she liked the book, but it did inspire her to go visit Katherine Cross’s grave, so I take that as a postive.

Michele Lee gave Ulrik a four-star review. Her review is up in several places, but I found it here at Visual Bookshelf. It’s also here at GoodReads, though she only gave it three stars here. This is the first line of her review: Ulrik stands somewhere between the traditional horror werewolf and the newer urban fantasy werewolf. The review contrasts the traditional werewolf to the urban fantasy werewolf and is pretty interesting.

And finally, Ethan Nahte’s review of Murdered by Human Wolves went up today at Pop Syndicate. He calls it “…an interesting, quick read that should appeal to werewolf fans, history lovers and those who enjoy a good mystery.”

I guess one of the good things about the small press is that books get more time to find an audience. With mass market, they’re out for a few weeks, then the covers and stripped and the book disappears into the void, unless the author was lucky enough to hit some magical sales number.

At any rate, I’m glad people are still reading and enjoying my Werewolf Saga.

I don’t often promote things from NPR, but this is a good one about the popularity of werewolf fiction by Linton Weeks. Here’s a little quote to get you interested:

Werefiction provides readers with much-needed escapism, says Leila Taylor, co-owner of Creatures ‘n Crooks Bookshoppe in Richmond, Va.: “People are wanting to read something that doesn’t make them depressed and that has a little excitement in it.”

And, she adds, “When it comes to the whole werewolves, werecats, werepanthers thing, people are getting tired of the vampire scene.”

Now if I could just get a major publisher to pick up The Werewolf Saga …

Writing on the new Werewolf Saga book, Nadia’s Children, is going very well. I mean, I’m really into the writing. This happened last December, on a project I can’t really discuss yet, but prior to that I haven’t been this engrossed in writing since Ulrik. I only have about 7,500 words at the moment, but I suspect it’ll continue to grow quickly, especially starting next week when I’m done with the teaching workshop I’m in all day every day this week.

I’ve introduced a new character. His name is Skandar. He is an Old One. I’m not sure yet what his role will be in the story, but it seems it’ll be bigger than I originally expected, as I’m fascinated with him.

I won’t make the mistake I’ve made with other books and talk about this one too much before it’s finished. That seems to jinx my progress, but I will post updates here every once in a while.

Please don’t forget about the Vampire vs Werewolf battle/signing with Gabrielle S. Faust next Saturday at Eerie Books of Wylie, Texas. We hope to see you there, and remember that Mission: Wolf and the werewolves can use your $2 donations (see the site for details).

I killed a friend yesterday.

I’d known this person since 1993. I met him because of a creative writing course at Francis Tuttle Technology Center. He’d been a good friend, though always a little strange. He didn’t deserve to die, but then life and death seldom play fair. I miss him already.

Fortunately, since he only exists in my fiction, I won’t be charged with murder for killing him. Still, considering I can’t name a single real friend I knew in 1993 that I still talk to today, I kind of feel like I killed a real person.

He’s gone, though. This needed to be done. Knowing it had to be done kept me from really getting started on the next book of The Werewolf Saga. I didn’t want to do it, you know. But now it’s done and I can go on. He may reappear through the magic of flashback and … I have three award-winning chapters and an outline of an historical romance novel that stars him, too. So, as Harley Shaw learned, “Dead ain’t gone, and gone ain’t dead.”

I have 25 pages of the new werewolf book done. That’s about 6,000 words. I suspect it will go pretty quickly now. Much quicker than The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date! This one is called Nadia’s Children. If you don’t know who Nadia is, you can find out by reading the history pages at The Werewolf Saga online. If you can’t figure out who I killed … you probably didn’t read the ending of Ulrik.

Finally, just a reminder about the Vampire vs Werewolf “fight” between me and Gabrielle Faust. It isn’t too late to make a $2 donation to Mission: Wolf for a chance to win all four signed volumes of The Werewolf Saga. Or, yeah, you can support the vampires and have a chance to win four books from Gabrielle by donating to her bat conservatory cause.

I am very pleased to say that Silver Cliff, Colorado-based Mission: Wolf has graciously accepted my invitation to join the werewolves in battle against Gabriel Faust and her vampire minions at Vampire vs Werewolf.

Mission: Wolf is a wonderful organization that rescues wolves born in captivity, as well as wolf hybrids, and gives the animals a safe home in a remote part of Colorado’s beautiful Rocky Mountains. They encourage visitors to come out, see the wolves, camp on-site and wake up to the song of the “children of the night.” They also take wolves on the road to educate people about the truth concerning these majestic and often misunderstood animals.

And, to make it even better, Kent was very cool about coming on board. Good folk there in Colorado! Speaking of which, I need to thank my long-time friend Robyn Lydick for recommending Mission: Wolf.

This is all well and good, you’re saying, then adding, “But what can I do?” I’m glad you asked! Go to www.vampirevswerewolf.com and read about the “battle” between the mighty werewolves and the dirt-sleeping vampires. Or, we can cut to the chase and you can just go straight to the donation page and start buying raffle tickets that will help support Mission: Wolf and put you in the running to win a full set of my Werewolf Saga books.

When you go visit the Mission: Wolf site, make sure you click on the Links page and read about some of the things being done for and to the wolves in North America. If that doesn’t make you want to support an organization like Mission: Wolf … well, I worry about ya.

Last word: Don’t forget to come to the live “battle” between me and Gabrielle at noon on July 18 at Eerie Books of Wylie, Texas.