Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Wonder boy Michael Chabon's second collection of stories tackles the American family in all its tragic and often frighteningly funny dysfunction. In the title story, a self-professed "King of the Retards" tries to distance himself from his next-door neighbor and only friend, who has taken their games (Plastic Man, Titanium Man, Matter-Eater Lad) just a little too far. In "House Hunting," a drunk real-estate agent shows a young couple through a house far too expensive for them, pocketing knickknacks and demonstrating a strange familiarity with its rooms. The wrenching "Son of the Wolfman" follows the aftermath of a rape; after a long struggle to conceive, Cara Glanzman becomes pregnant by her rapist and decides to keep the child, even as her husband struggles with his violent thoughts. In spite of the potential for sensationalism in such a plot, "Wolfman" is moving, unsentimental, and like the rest of these tales, wholly original.

Chabon is a master of the lively and unexpected description, his prose studded with images that split these mostly conventionally themed stories wide open. Consider his burly Quebecois carpenter, who has "a face that looked as if it had been carved with a pneumatic drill by a tiny workman dangling from the sheer granite cliff of Olivier's forehead." Or the "local drunks" of a Chubb Island bar, "a close-knit population, involved in an ongoing collective enterprise: the building, over several generations, of a basilica of failure, on whose crowded friezes they figured in vivid depictions of bankruptcy, drug rehabilitation, softball, and arrest." Or, the narrator of "Mrs. Box" and his failed marriage: "...very soon they had been forced to confront the failure of an expedition for which they had set out remarkably ill-equipped, like a couple of trans-Arctic travelers who through lack of preparation find themselves stranded and are forced to eat their dogs." Werewolves in Their Youth is worth reading for such moments alone. When Chabon uses them to illuminate our darkest impulses and fears, the result is often revelatory. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Applying his ironic talents to even darker material than in previous outings, Chabon has produced a winning collection of nine stories. Failed marriages haunt almost all the protagonists; personal disasters, depressive malaise and sexual violence are recurring themes. In "House Hunting," a realtor is more intent on stealing objects from a house than on showing it to his clients, a troubled young couple. His bizarre incompetence increases the tension between them, finally driving them into one another's arms. A young man flees town in "Mrs. Box," hoping to leave the twin disasters of his marriage and his business behind. He stops to visit his wife's senile grandmother and suddenly resolves to rob her of her jewelry, only to find a half-measure of redemption when his plan misfires. In the title story, Paul is the only one on the school playground who can call Timothy back from his werewolf fantasy, but Paul, who is already taunted for smelling weird, can't risk being associated too closely with his strange pal. As a result, Timothy attacks a fellow student and is reassigned to a "Special School." The closing tale, "In the Black Mill," presented as a story by August Van Zorn, a writer Chabon invented in Wonder Boys, is a brilliant riff on pulp horror tales featuring an archeologist who unearths the terrifying secrets of a small town. Here, Chabon is as witty as ever while dispensing with the glibness that sometimes marred his earlier work. His characters, even whey they are silly and flawed, come across as sympathetic, three-dimensional human beings. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 2nd edition (January 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312254385
• ISBN-13: 978-0312254384
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #211,080 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #22 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( C ) > Chabon, Michael

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chabon offers masterful snapshots of the human condition., April 20, 1999

By	Peter M. Wallace (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories (Hardcover)

In each of these nine stories, Chabon--particularly noted for his stylistic accomplishments--manages to flesh out a variety of characters in only a few pages, and sometimes in a few words. His sentences frequently seem to reach perfection, each word fitting precisely with a satisfying snap like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle, without the disappointing sting of over-cleverness.

As I read each wholly original story, I couldn't help but respond frequently with a knowing smile and the warm realization of recognition. I've smelled that smell and heard that sound ("There was a stink of chlorine from the waterfall in the atrium where the chimes of the elevators echoed all night with a sound like a dental instrument hitting a cold tile floor"). I've seen that place, even though I've never been there ("Plunkettsburg was at first glance unprepossessing--a low, rusting little city, with tarnished onion domes and huddled houses, drab as an armful of dead leaves strewn along the ground"). I've felt that feeling ("The next day I lay in bed, aching, sore, and suffering from that peculiar brand of spiritual depression born largely of suppressed fear"). And I most assuredly know that person ("Oriole was a big, broad-backed woman, ample and plain and quadrangular as the state of Iowa itself. Hugging her, Eddie felt comforted, as by the charitable gaze of a cow"). Each page proffers several such stylistic gems, which serve to draw you into the story without putting you off with their brilliance.

Chabon has the ability to hook our heart by ripping the skin off some of the more devastating aspects of contemporary dysfunctional life--divorce, rape, alcoholism, mental illness--while giving us permission, even encouraging us, to laugh at the absurd behavior of these human beings who remind us so much of ourselves. These stories are bitingly funny because we know them, we've been there, or we've imagined them ourselves. They are fresh and original, and yet they resonate with familiarity.

Perhaps you had to have been a boy once to fully appreciate the haunting title story. Poignant and powerful, it prodded many of my own boyhood memories, stirring up emotional coals that still smolder in this 44-year-old body. "Werewolves in Their Youth" captures at once the magical imagination of youth--playing super-hero, android, or werewolf--and the harrowing, confusing reality that insists on breaking in when those childish fantasies go too far. It reads like a mature, modern Ray Bradbury, yet with a more satisfying and non-artificial ending. In fact, the endings of all these tales transmit a note of surprise, but without disingenuousness.

Here are ordinary people in ordinary situations--a graduation party, a bris, a night at a ramshackle island bar--who are revealed as twisted and awry because of their inner fear, violent anger, or confusion. Yet these are stories that repeatedly strike a chord because, after all, there's a little of the werewolf in each of us.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sneaking up on Nabokov, August 11, 2003

By	Mark Silcox (The American Southwest.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is the better of Chabon's two short story collections. There isn't a lot of thematic variation here - all of these stories except for the very last one are about the muddles and unpredictabilities attendant upon married life, and reading them quickly one after the other can be a bit of a downer for this reason. But Chabon has an incredible gift with language, and although a lot of his characters are losers or muddleheaded or the victims of terrible decisions, his prose makes the world around them seem so rich and pregnant with possibilities that it's difficult to find any of the yarns here too depressing. The only time he misfires is in one story that's set entirely in a neighborhood bar - Chabon clearly doesn't frequent such places, and his attempt to catch the atmosphere in one is condescending and a little cliched.

The last story, "In The Black Mill," was a special treat for me. I'm a big fan of gothic horror and this is a wonderful pastiche of M.R. James with maybe a touch of Poe. One hopes that the author never gets so soaked up in Northeastern literary culture that he begins to think that this sort of genre exercise is beneath his dignity.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable, vivid, achingly tender stories, April 18, 2001

By A Customer

I have to admit that the cover of this collection put me off a bit. I'm not usually attracted to Werewolves. But when I realized that the Werewolf in the title story wasn't a supernatural creature, but a child who felt like I did way back when -- isolated,friendless, lonely -- I couldn't help but buy the book. And I was overwhelmed, frankly. Chabon's snapshots of life's moments -- sometimes redemptive, often painful -- touched me in a way most contemporary fiction doesn't. There's a bit of Yates here, some Cheever, Alice Munro, even Lovecraft. And there is something entirely Chabon about it. I couldn't help but laugh at the "reviewers" whose main complaint was that they had to use a dictionary every once in a while. What a great pleasure that was for me -- to discover a word or two that I'd never read before. Isn't that the beauty of the English language? That it contains these mysteries and gifts of little used but fabulous words? How lucky we are to have a writer able to send us tripping through the Oxford English Dictionary while keeping us absolutely grounded in the contemporary American experience.