Monster Mash: Werewolves

Our second creature feature this week is a little hairier than the last, but just as bloodthirsty. By the way, did you know that there's a full moon this Friday? Pleasant dreams!

Red Moon
By Benjamin Percy

Billed as a political novel about werewolves, this book imagines what the United States would be like if a percentage of the population could shift into vicious animals at will. In this world there is a werewolf underground full of radicals who believe they shouldn't be expected to take the drug that suppresses their ability to change. There is a werewolf homeland in Europe that is occupied by U.S. forces. There is even a college with an exclusively werewolf student population. But the werewolves live on a razor's edge of tolerance from those around them.

Claire, a teenage girl, knows that her parents are to the political left. But until the government kills them after a werewolf terrorist attack she doesn't realize how deep their history with the radicals goes.

Patrick, a teenage boy, knows that his dad is gone to bolster the U.S. forces in the Lupine Republic, but he doesn't have any personal experience with werewolves until he's the only survivor of an attack on an airplane.

These two characters make their way from kids who have been sheltered from the complexities of life to young adults who have to make tough decisions about loyalty, family, and survival. As a presidential election is in the works, with an anti-werewolf third party candidate leading the polls, the entire country wrestles with what is wrong and what is right when it comes to the monsters among them.

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Review by Danny Hanbery