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The Werewolf of Paris

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This is my all-time favorite novel. I've read it so many times, I've lost track. When I first read it, I couldn't believe it wasn't a nineteenth century French novel, and that author Guy Endore was a twentieth century American.

Werewolf is the odyssey of born pariah Bertrand Caillet, a werewolf in spite of himself. Every life he touches suffers, whether he means it to or not. He rifles graves for sustenance during his lycanthropic episodes, and conceals his identity by becoming a French soldier during the Franco-Prussian War and the Communard uprising. He even finds the one woman whose love might save him, an equally bizarre but oddly touching Jewish outcast named Sophie with decidedly S&M tastes.

The novel is many things, not the least of which is episodic. It's a love story, a war story, a tragedy, and an absurdist comedy, by turns. It's grotesquely funny, and hilariously terrifying. Most of all, it's a mature social satire, and just an incredibly damn good read.

Crime of crimes, this magnificent literary masterpiece has once again fallen out of print. Seek it out in the used book bins, until some publisher manages to rediscover it and put it back on the shelves of your local bookstore.

I suppose that I owe a debt of gratitude to writer Marvin Kaye, who selected Guy Endore's classic novel of lycanthropy, "The Werewolf of Paris," for inclusion in Newman & Jones' excellent overview volume "Horror: 100 Best Books." If it hadn't been for Kaye's article on this masterful tale, who knows if I would have ever run across it, and that would have been a real shame, because this is one very impressive piece of work indeed. In this beautifully written novel from 1933, we learn the history of one Bertrand Caillet, the product of a lecherous priest with a sinister family history raping a French peasant girl in the early 1850s. Caillet is later raised by Aymar Galliez, the nephew of the woman who had hired the peasant girl as a maid, and his notes on Caillet, purportedly found many years later by the author, form the kernel of this tale. It does not take Aymar long to realize that something is decidedly wrong with his young charge; in fact, Caillet is a werewolf, who loves nothing more than leaping out of his bedroom window at night and killing livestock and assorted wayfarers around the countryside. Years later, as a young man, Caillet runs away to Paris, to continue his depredations in a more populous arena, but at a most inauspicious time: right in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War, and right before the incredible violence of the Paris Commune of 1871. But this novel is so much more than a simple tale of horror, although there ARE many grisly scenes. Endore (whose real name was Harry Relis) views his werewolf not as a monster, but rather as a sympathetic victim. Although Bertrand commits some truly horrible acts--killing his best friend, committing incest with his mother, despoiling graves, murdering countless creatures, draining his wealthy Jewish girlfriend (a neurotic, self-destructive, death-obsessed girl who today would probably be a Goth) slowly of her life's blood--the author makes it clear that the atrocities going on around him (e.g., the 20,000 Parisians killed by the Versaillists during the Commune) make his sins seem small indeed. Presciently, the author says that future wars will kill millions, a prediction sadly borne out just a decade after this book's release. Perhaps what is most remarkable about this tale, though, is its seeming veracity. Endore gives us so much information about the Commune, and peoples his novel with so many actual historical figures, that it really is difficult to tell where fact ends and fiction begins. There supposedly really was a Sgt. Bertrand in 1840s Paris who was said to be a grave-despoiling werewolf, and that fact adds an additional frisson to this tale. Thus, "The Werewolf of Paris" works as both an excellent tale of terror AND an easy-to-take lesson in French history. I knew virtually zilch about the Commune before going into this book, but feel that I've learned quite a bit about it now, and in a fun way, too. That's not to say that fans of a good horror tale will be left unsatisfied. As I mentioned, this tale contains its fair share of gore and grue, and some pretty terrible incidents are depicted. The horrible tale of that lecherous priest's ancestor being tortured in an oubliette will not soon be forgotten, the real-life facts of the Commune atrocities are equally quite disturbing, and a discussion of the dietary experiments tried by the desperate Communards (ragout of rat, anyone?) will surely turn the stomachs of most. The pitiful final fate of Bertrand Caillet will surely move most readers, too. Despite an occasional glitch here and there (Bertrand travels northeast to reach Paris from the Yonne River valley, when he should be going northwest; Bertrand is said to have been interred in August 1873 and exhumed in June 1881, after eight years and two months, but that should be seven years and 10 months), this really is a terrific piece of writing from Mr. Endore. Anyway, thanks again, Marvin! I owe you one!

Guy Endore's 'The Werewolf of Paris' is rightly considered a classic of horror and being published in 1933 as one of the first literary treatments of lycanthropy. The story is told from the view of an American scholar studying in Paris who happens upon an old manuscript concerning the court martial of Sergeant Bertrand Caillet at the time of the Paris Commune. The story of Bertand is then recounted, how he was conceived when his mother was raped by a priest and how he was born on Christmas Eve, a bad omen according to local superstition. At first he seems like a normal boy but then he starts to have strange dreams and farm animals start to become mysteriously slaughtered. His adoptive uncle suspect something is amiss with young Bertrand, but keeps the suspicions of the local villagers lulled by locking Bertrand's room at night and feeding him raw meat, which keeps his lycanthropy quiescent. This works for a few years until Bertrand is old enough to travel outside the village for his school exams, where he has an unfortunate tryst with a prostitute and acquires a taste for human blood. When his uncle finds out what has happened Bertrand flees to Paris, where he gets caught up in the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian war.
Bertrand is presented as a likable young man afflicted with a condition beyond his power to control. We also sympathize with his uncle who follows him to Paris, conflicted by his love for his adopted son and guilt over the deaths caused by him. Bertrand's crimes are contrasted with the horrors of the Paris Commune and the even greater horrors of the reprisals by the Versailles government. The book meanders somewhat but is still a very good story and a classic of the genre.

Authors are painters -- little fellas that you invite into your mind who then proceed to paint pictures on the walls of your brain. Some pictures are pretty. Others are visions of horror so twisted and evil that we can only whisper the descriptions. If you read this book, Guy Endore will kick open the front door of your mind and start painting the most horrific, intoxicating, and disturbing pictures imaginable. Endore uses all of the paints too - suspense, gore, crimes against nature, murder - you name it, it's in there.

WARNING - There is history. Aw geeze, do I have to? Don't worry, it will help give depth to the dementia.

WARNING - This book is often shocking. There were moments in this book when I actually started talking to myself aloud. "No. No, he didn't. Tell me he didn't just do what I think he did. No way. (Man, this book is messed-up.)"

WARNING - Pregnant women, small children, and people who can not control their bladders should not read this book.

In my mind, I see a little guy. Occasionally, he looks back at the pictures that Endore painted. You see, the little guy can't decide if he should paint over these gory masterpieces or keep them. It's just wishful thinking though. The little guy knows these images aren't going away. There's no scrapping away these paints. Poor little fella is stuck with them. Lucky guy.

This is a fascinating novel. It deserves to be better-remembered than it is. It is a well-researched epic, written with a good deal of wit. It tells the story of Bertrand, who was born a werewolf. It follows his tragic life to its bitter conclusion. The story is quite subversive, involving a lot of social commentary and quite a bit of kink.

Those readers looking for an out-an-out horror story might be a bit disappointed. The novel is very digressive - we lose Bertrand for great swaths of the story. We know that he turns into a wolf, but there isn't much description of his werewolf activity here - that is left to the readers imagination. We know he can turn into a wolf but he is not a slave to the full moon. He does not even fully change when he attacks people. The change can be staved off as long as he is given plenty of meat...or, if his obliging girlfriend will let him drink her blood.

I read the Kindle edition of this book. It does not come with the forward by Thomas Tessier and there are many typographical errors.

(And it's really written with all the good taste left to literature by the very beginning of the twentieth century... It's a classic, about the struggle between civilization and the beast we call man.)

"He panted through his open mouth. And he felt his tongue, the short and bulky tongue of man, begin to flatten and lengthen. "God help me!" he cried. But now the tongue was curling out of his mouth, was hanging over his teeth. Unable to resist any more,he sprang from his bed. He went to a corner of his room, muzzled under a piece of cloth and dragged forth an arm, a human arm. The last of the two arms he had taken from La belle Normade.

He sank his teeth into it. His eyes glared around suspiciously. Low growls came from his throat. For a while there was silence, then there were more noises, the slap of a hard dead hand as it hit the floor, the crunching a of bone, and occasionally a sharp tick as a ring on one finger struck the wood."

*****************

"Aymar soon discovered that he was talking nonsense. The Commune shot fifty-seven from the prison of La Roquette. Versailles retaliated with nineteen hundred. To that comparison add this one. The whole famous Reign of Terror in fifteen months guillotined 2,596 aristos. The Versaillists executed 20,000 commoners before their firing squads in one week. Do these figures represent the comparative efficincy of guillotine and modern rifle, or the comparitive cruelty of upper and lower class mobs?

Bertrand, it now semed to Aymar, was but a mild case. What was a werewolf who had killed a couple of prostitutes, who had dug up a few corpses, compared with these bands of tigers slashing at each other with daily increasing ferocity! "And there'll be worse," he thought and again he had that marvelous rising of the heart. Instead of thousands, future ages will kill millions. It will go on, the figures will rise and the process will accelerate! Hurrah for the race of werewolves!"

"She awoke to find herself in the grip of a strange tenor." I found that sentence part of the way through the edition of "The Werewolf of Paris" by Guy Endore. "Poor mutilated book," I thought. Just as the protagonist has his intentions twisted into a grotesque and horrible reality by his discovery that he is a werewolf, I found as I read this novel that my emotions were strangely twisted by these bizarre accidents that appear in this edition to have been created by a text scanner and not adequately proofed.

"She was overcome with honor."

I read "Voltaire, Voltaire," by Guy Endore when I was a teenager and my imagination was enflamed by the ambitions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. This tormented writer lived in a maze of contradictions. He wrote about the relationship between the individual and society in "The Social Contract," and abandoned his six illegitimate children; he wanted to be like the writer Voltaire, but he was not witty enough to write a satire like Candide.

I wanted to write like Guy Endore. I studied French and read about the Enlightenment and disapproved of everything that people said, but defended their right to say it. I read "The King of Paris" a biography of Alexander Dumas by Endore and I was inspired to write millions of words of fiction--or hundreds of thousands of words, anyway.

I read his biography of the Marquis de Sade and found myself understanding, at least intellectually, the complicated relationship between pain and pleasure, tormentor and victim.

On the basis of those biographies I wanted to read "The Werewolf of Paris." I knew that it would be passionate and that it would hold up a mirror to a world that I had never seen, but wanted to know all about.

He paused to gaze at his reflection in the minor.

I couldn't find the novel in my local library when I was fourteen, but the title stuck in my mind along with the assorted werewolf references that accumulated there over the decades, from Warren Zevon's song "Werewolf of London," to the movie "An American Werewolf in London." So the title popped into my head while I was shopping for books online and I popped for the read.

I'm not as interested in French history as I once was, but I became absorbed in the sufferings of the protagonist and thought that the descriptions of the "Terror" in the novel were as fresh and terrifying as many of the horrors depicted in the daily newspapers that I read to this very day. It seems that in some parts of the world, even some parts of the very city I live in, people distrust and mistreat each other by torturing and killing them, while next door, or on the next block or in the next office-building a civilized veneer persists and people are polite and crack jokes.

Although it is considered the original werewolf story, it's obvious why "The Werewolf of Paris" has not become a popular monster classic like "Frankenstein," "Dracula," and "The Phantom of the Opera." A slow-paced story, it is not very well-written and certainly not very compelling. Don't get me wrong, there are interesting parts and points made in the book. But, overall, it definitely is not a compelling monster story. Added to that is the disturbing fact that my edition (Blackmask Online) was filled with numerous misspellings and typos. The tale of Bertrand Caillet, who was born on Christmas Eve to a mother who was raped by a priest, "The Werewolf of Paris" follows Bertrand from birth to his participation in the Paris Commune of 1871. Born a werewolf with hair on the palm of his hands, Bertrand kills a few people and then goes to Paris and falls in love. Although there are scenes of Bertrand killing as a wolf, don't expect to find any transformation scenes, or even much about Bertrand's life as a werewolf. Apparently, the story contains one of the first references to a "Wolf-man," however, and this inspired the classic horror movie. As a monster novel, one is advised to read "Dracula" or "The Phantom of the Opera" for a more interesting and better written story. As a werewolf novel, one is advised to read Adam Pfeffer's "Kolak of the Werebeasts" for a more stimulating and compelling horror tale. The book was written by Guy Endore to compete with "Dracula," but, in my opinion, the story falls short of a classic monster novel. Although it is readable, there are better and more compelling stories in this genre.

Endore's book starts out well enough, with a slice of history that leaves your stomach turning. From there, the book goes down-hill. The supporting characters might as well be cardboard cut-outs, for all of their personality. Then, towards the middle of the book, the author starts introducing historical information about the revolution taking place during the books time period. Though the revolution does effect the characters, the way that Endore completely throws the plot out the window to focus on the history is terribly excessive. The single thought-provoking idea that Endore does discuss is this: who are the real werewolves? Is it the man who changes when there is a full moon, or is it you and I when we're at our worst? I would recommend this book to a history buff, but if you're simply on the look-out for a good thriller, look elsewhere.

A GRUESOME CHRONICLE OF THE 1840'S IN FRANCE. HELLO MISTER WEREWOLF! GUY ENDORE ALWAYS PUTS EVERYTHING IN HIS HALF NOVEL-HALF HISTORIC COMMENTARIES. THEY'RE FOREVER A ROLLACOASTER. FASTEN YOUR SEATBELT. ANOTHER AUTHOR TO PERUSE FOR A THRILL; MONTAGUE R. JAMES.