Customer Reviews

Murcheston: The Wolf's Tale

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

"Murcheston: The Wolf's Tale" is a wonderfully written novel that follows the tale of the Duke of Darnley infliction of lycanthropy. After Darnley, a self-absorbed aristocrat discovers himself to be a werewolf he begins a journal in the hope of sharing his discover with the world. He embarks on a relentless search for answers believing the one's that he finds to be untrue and bias. His journal quickly becomes a rationalization for the crimes he has committed to mankind; however there is never any regret. Holland does a wonderful job of allowing us to peer into the mind of Darnley as his mental state spins into oblivion. This book is a must read and will become a classic.

Edgar Lenoir, the thirteenth Duke of Danby, is wealthy, powerful, and takes his responsibilities seriously. However, everything changes following a hunting rip in the Carpathian Mountains when Edgar kills a wolf, which is not quite the pure blood lupine it appears to be. Before killing the beast, the animal claws Edgar, which leaves him sick. He recovers to return to his home in Victorian England.

On the first full moon since he returned to England, Edgar turns into a werewolf, frolicking on his estate with a sense of freedom he never felt before. He cherishes his so-called affliction, embracing lycanthropy to the point that his human soul begins to shrivel. Unable to deal any longer with the human cattle, Edgar withdraws from society. His isolation ends when he wanders into London only to receive protection from his best friend Charles Meredith and the man's wife Elizabeth, the only woman Edgar ever loved. However, his transformation horrifies them, but not as much as Edgar's plans for the city.

MURCHESTON: THE WOLF'S TALE is a gothic-like novel complete with foggy nights, an isolated manor, and a damsel in danger and distress. The story line is written in the Victorian style, which adds to the overall impact of the tale. Tom Holland writes a werewolf tale that will set the standard for future such books to be measured against as he makes werewolves seem genuine and Edgar's joyful dissent into hell feel very real. This novel will be for years to come the definite fictional work on lycanthropy.

Some of the other customer-reviewers here have made some valid points about some of the reasons why Murcheston may not be the classic werewolf book to rest aside Dracula and Frankenstein, but they have also missed one of the singular pleasures in the book:

Murcheston is a compelling philosophical debate between ideas of individual strength and social obligation. Our aristocrat-turned-lycanthrope was always something of iconoclast, but with the transition to his new state he becomes an articulate advocate of man-as-animal, of might-makes-right, of survival-of-the-strongest.

Much of the book is told in the form of Lord Darnley's journal; and so we have his voice deriding the threadbare traditions of religion and also the hollow values and norms of society. Quite deftly, however, Holland makes the arguments of Darnley's opponents come alive through Darnley's own voice, and provides a very absorbing and persuasive debate.

Holland took the study in a psychological direction, imagining the impact on the individual of the philosophy lived to the fullest, under the influence of this great power and uncontrollable disease of lycanthropy. As such, Lord Darnley convincingly became less human in the course of his own journals, and throughout the larger work.

The psychological study was interesting, but to my mind less interesting than a fuller exploration of the philosophical distinction might have been.

Perhaps appropriate for the time(*) Darnley's arguments for the rule of strength, and the natural, animal nature of the human state were primarily explorations of Darwin's idea of natural selection in combination with a Nazi/Nietsche übermensch mentality, and while I was happy to see the counterarguments presented in a surprising and original manner, I was a little disappointed to see Darnley's case undercut by his own madness. There is a real debate here, and it does little good to present something widely thought of as evil and then expose the obvious flaws.

A more interesting approach might be to take the more contemporary if-it-feels-right-it-is-right rejection of traditional morality, equate feeling right with animal instinct, and then contrast this very contemporary mentality that is *not* thought of as evil with some of the same arguments for the higher nature of being human that Holland has made. This would be a more meaningful debate for our age, and one that does not have a clear outcome.

In short, Holland tells a good story. His characters are fascinating studies in psychology; there is a pleasantly surprising philosophical debate carried on within the text; and it is a worthwhile book to pick up on a dark and stormy night. Holland is onto something when he correlates the lycanthrope with the debate between the spiritual and animal sides of humanity, but in this book he does not explore that debate in a manner terribly relevant to our time. Given his affinity for Victoriana, that was probably not his intention.

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* He doesn't state it, but given that Victoria was queen, transportation to Australia was common, railroads were also common, this would pretty much have to be the late 1830s or early 1840s, a decade or two before Darwin's Origin of the Species.

I didn't dislike this book, but I did find the story line rather monotonous and predictable, with very few twists, and the main character the obvious Byronic type, and not fully developed. I appreciated it being told in a pseudo-victorian style, but I felt that the language was overly dramatic and rather bald, particularly towards the end. It was also obviously written by an American, too--not that there's anything wrong with that, of course--just that the language was a bit "off" as well as the setting. It just didn't seem to be written by a person who knew London or England very well, or at least didn't convey his knowledge fully. I don't think that this will become a classic, just another filler until the ultimate wearwolf book comes along.

Edgar Lenoir, Duke of Darnley, survives a wolf attack only to discover, on the next full moon, that he is a werewolf. His diary tells the story of his lycanthropy, from his first transformation and his research on his affliction, through his slow descent into bestial nature. With a dark Victorian setting and careful themes of human nature, animal nature, and morality, Murcheston tries to be an unusual and intelligent werewolf novel. Unfortunately, it is bogged down by redundancy and a lengthy, unbelievable narrative style. I didn't enjoy it, and I don't recommend it.

Murcheston is an unusual, historical, intelligent werewolf novel, quite outside the contemporary genre. It is told in a combination of personal accounts, Darnley's dairy, and transcribed fictional documents, and it takes place in a detailed Victorian setting. Most interesting by far are the theories and themes. Darnley describes his mental states and his time as a wolf, theories about the causes and results of lycanthropy, and his changing views on human morality, human nature, and animal nature. These aspects show careful thought and slow development, and the contrast between Darnley's convincing argument for amorality and the judgment of the narrator is compelling and horrifying.

All of these factors are promising and well-intended--but they all falter and fail. The thoughtful, careful themes of the book are hobbled by predictability (the plot developments are blatantly predictable, Darnley of course turns into just the sort of monster that he initially scorns) and redundancy. Over and over, via diary and description and transcribed text, Darnley repeats his thoughts on morality and man's bestial nature until it becomes banal, obvious, and therefore meaningless. Furthermore, the writing style is lengthy, slow going--I could only slog through twenty pages at a time before growing bored and taking a break. Holland's narrative choices are poor and unrealistic: the third person narrative which ends Darnley's story conflicts with the first person narrative which begins it, and Darnley's diary and the transcribed texts are unbelievably lengthy, full irrelevant descriptions and precisely quoted dialog. The unbelievable storytelling is frustrating to read, and it makes the themes even more meaningless.

I love the concept and intentions of this novel, and I tried hard to like the book itself. I still appreciate some of Darnley's insights into man's animal nature. Nonetheless, I grew increasingly frustrated as the book dragged on--first with the unrealistic narrative, and then with the increasingly predictable and repetitive themes. I don't regret reading it, and the interested reader (and werewolf fan) may still want to pick it up--for the book's attempt, at least, if not its execution. But I ultimately did not enjoy and do not recommend Murcheston, and the casual reader would do better with a different werewolf novel.

A man becomes a werewolf, much to the distress of those around him-after countless variations on the werewolf legends, via novels and films, one would be justified in asking `so what?' The answer, as found in David Holland's Murcheston would be: `so nothing.'

In Holland's novel we find a protagonist who is quite overjoyed to find that he has become a werewolf, as this state allows him to transcend traditional morality. Hardly an original idea but, in the hands of a more capable writer, one that might have led to a novel of some psychological insight, one that delved into the depths of the human psyche and so forth (see Hesse's Steppenwolf), but Holland's treatment of his character's predicament remains frustratingly superficial, limited to scenes in which the character, for example, describes the great exhilaration he feels running through the fields, pouncing upon prey, etc. What emerges is not an examination of morality, or an exploration of human psyche, but just another ably-told adventure yarn.

And while Holland ostensibly places the action of the novel in Victorian England, at no point does the writer exhibit any great knowledge of that place and era. When one's characters mouth idioms like "taken for a loony," "crap," and "f--- society," one hardly feels transported back to Victorian London. No, while reading this, one is painfully aware of being in the presence of a contemporary writer, moreover, one with nothing much in particular to say. The geographical descriptions are also strictly generic, at no point re-creating England in the mind's eye.

As far as traditional yarn-spinning, Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris would be a good place for those readers interested in lycanthropic fiction to start. And for a re-creation of Victorian England by a contemporary sensibility, I would steer readers toward K. W. Jeter's Infernal Devices, a much more capable and truly entertaining tale placed within that era.

While Mr. Holland is to be respected for working upon, and actually finishing, a novel-no easy task, as any frustrated writer will attest-still, I feel compelled to warn others before they part with their hard-earned cash for the results.

Murchestion: The Wolf's Tale is more than a good werewolf book, its a good book in general. It tells the tale of a Duke in Victorian England who is infected with Lycanthropy, the werewolf virus. Through third person narration and personal journals, Holland leads the reader through the Duke's new life with surprising frankness. Murcheston is different from a lot of werewolf fiction out there. Holland keeps things very simple: take a man, make him a werewolf, and explore his condition together. The plot doesn't get over powered with the supernatural, rather, the main character tries base his condition firmly in science. This might turn off some readers, but I rather liked the serious take on the subject. This is not a swash buckling adventure, but rather a serious story that deals as much with the adventures the Duke has stalking through the woods as it does with the psychological and sociological aspects of releasing you're inner beast. As one doing research for his own stab at werewolf fiction I found it an indispensable resource of the psychological issues raised by a wolf in human's clothing. That being said, for those looking for a hack and slash horror book, keep looking. For someone looking for a good character study with adventure thrown in, this is what you want. My only complaint is that the middle of the book tended to drag a little, but I still very much wanted to finish the Duke's story. Overall a great read.

Ok, so what is different about David Holland's werewolf book, Murcheston?

Not a lot. It's set in London in the middle 1800's. The werewolf, the narrator in much of the book, does what werewolves do, and mauls a bunch of people and slowly reveals himself to be evil. There is a question of whether he was evil before. He was, at least, a jerk, before being turned into a werewolf, which made it very difficult for me to care whether or not he figured things out or not.

I guess the argument could be made that he is not supposed to be likeable, that it's about someone bad spiraling into madness. Except the main character is so unsympathetic from the beginning that I don't recognize any spiral. He doesn't seem to change through the novel at all, he was a selfish jerk in the beginning and he's a selfish jerk at the end.

There are several sympathetic characters in the book, but they aren't fleshed out very well, since our narrator is a selfish jerk, they are only described insomuch as they inconvenience him... or don't.

This is a great example of how not to do a book with a misanthropic main character. Dreoteth is a book I would point to as a book that did it very well. Except with awesome dragons.

Pass it up if you see it. I'm glad to be done with it.

David Holland's "Murcheston: The Wolf's Tale," is a refreshing rejection of the splatterpunk school of contemporary horror. Rather than churning out just another hack'n' slash gorefest, Holland goes for a refined, richly atmospheric morality tale--which, consequently, is what traditional horror is all about, not graphic decapitations and streaming blood. Perhaps Holland's novel could be alternately known as "Interview with the Werewolf," as in essence that is what much of the novel is. Through his diary, we're with him all the way as the Lord Darnley records his transformation from draconian but all-too-human aristocrat to monster wolf. The ensuing insight into the nature of evil, human and inhuman, and by contrast the opposing nature of good, is starkly illuminating and particularly pertinent to our own society. If the Victorian world in which Holland set his tale was one teetering on the brink of a moral abyss, what of our own, wherein morality is often defined in terms perhaps a bit too Darnley-like: you are your own judge, and no man--no God--can ever condemn you. Despite the supernatural basis of his story, Holland eschews many of the overly fantastic and traditional trappings of his genre, and so avoids some of the cliches that sink so many fantasy tales. His characters, human and otherwise, are well-developed and easy to identify with. Holland's style is scholarly but realistic and holds the reader in thrall to the end. A wonderful cauldron of misty mountains, spiraling emotions, moon-haunted skylines, and stealthy death, "Murcheston" is one of the very, very few horror novels that deserves to be called "literature." If you are a frustrated horror fan who longs for something more than the usual fare, "Murcheston" has my highest possible recommendation.

Recently I embarked on a search for the ultimate werewolf novel. There are quite a few really bad ones, some pretty decent ones ("Wilderness", "Saint Peter's Wolf" and "Thor" come to mind), and a few truly excellent ones ("Moon Dance" for example). "Murcheston:The Wolf's Tale" stands head and shoulders above them all. Holland has succeeded in crafting a novel that stands comfortably alongside Frankenstein and Dracula as a horror classic. Literate, thoughtful and also exciting, Murcheston is a triumph of class and style over the run-of-the-mill slice and dice shockers I have had to wade through. Where others have relied on excessive gore and/or sex to carry the ball Holland builds a strong story around a brilliantly developed central character and a riveting narrative. Sure, there is plenty of bloodshed but the gore is in service of the story, not the entire reason for the story. Holland has higher goals in mind here, as Stoker and Shelly did and that is what sets this one apart. So if you are searching for the ultimate werewolf novel take my word for it; This one is THE STANDARD which others will aspire to.