A pack of feral (Savage; wild) teenagers raise hell as they pursue their wildest visions of utopiaWhere do werewolves fit in the pantheon of horror? Vampires are easy: they are aristocrats and capitalists. As Marx understood: “Capital is dead labour,that, vampire-like, or only lives by sucking living labour,and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Zombies are senseless consumers or, and in Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2005 novel Handling the Undead,a metaphor for the most vulnerable in society. Ghosts are the return of the repressed and the dispossessed. Werewolves have tended to be a bit like Mr Hyde, a manifestation of unfettered id. It is not the least of its virtues that Kirk Lynn’s Rules for Werewolves finds a original slant on the view. Whether the characters in his novel are werewolves or not is one of the enigmas it gifts to the reader. But what is certain is that the cast are mostly teenagers and they are decidedly feral (Savage; wild). Squatting in houses that the bank has foreclosed on, or where the owners are on holiday,they drink, fight, and win drugs,have sex, feud, and harbour grudges,steal, lie and try to form their own kind of utopia.
Lynn is a dramatist and it is therefore unsurprising that the novel is primarily dialogue, and with a few soliloquies and the occasional stage direction,but no continuous narrative prose. What is surprising is how quickly the formal qualities of the book become invisible. There are no “character attributions” and this works rather well: the size of the pack remains uncertain; lines might be said by one character or another. Although they have dropped out of conventional society to the extent that they have no email, no mobiles, and no Twitter nor Instagram accounts,these werewolves remain profoundly social creatures.
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Source: theguardian.com