Books of 2024: Week 43 - Cycle of the Werewolf

Stephen King tells a werewolf story.

CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF by Stephen King

The “novelette” Cycle of the Werewolf came about because Christopher Zavista of Land of Enchantment Press had the clever idea to pair the artwork of Bernie Wrightson with the words of Stephen King for a calendar project. King would write a short story that would be separated into twelve vignettes, one for every month, and Wrightson would provide the art that would accompany each month’s vignette. Tasked with writing something that would play out over twelve months, King decided to build the story around the lunar cycle. Each vignette would be about a werewolf terrorizing the small town of Tarker’s Mills, Maine during the monthly full moon. Then he took liberties with the lunar cycle so the werewolf attacks could take place on certain holidays, like Valentine’s Day, Independence Day, and New Year’s Eve. 

King said the idea appealed to him because it would give him the chance to write a bunch of different, interesting murders. Since, after all, the werewolf has to kill someone (or something) every month. But he didn’t just want to write a series of murder scenes; he wanted the kills to have an interesting story happening around them. And once he figured out the story and characters, he ran into another problem: he found it difficult to write something short enough to fit on a calendar page. That’s not very surprising, given that he’s a writer whose novels sometimes pass the 1000 page mark – but then again, writing something short enough to fit on a calendar page beside an illustration would probably be a challenge for a lot of writers. So the story grew bigger, until Land of Enchantment had to change the plan. This wouldn’t be a calendar, it would be a short novel, with Wrightson still on board to provide illustrations that would appear throughout the book.

The final product is a fun read and features some awesome Wrightson art. Although King said he didn’t want to just write a bunch of murder scenes, that’s exactly how the book starts out. January and February introduce characters just to kill them off. But as the chapters go on, we start to learn more about the town of Tarker’s Hills and its residents... some of whom seem to be rather unpleasant people, as you’d expect from a King novel. It isn’t until July that King introduces a young handicapped boy named Marty Coslaw – and even though Marty is only featured in a few chapters, he becomes the hero of the story. The local authorities are overwhelmed as the bodies keep piling up, some of the residents decide to take matters into their own hands, but it’s only Marty who figures out the identity of the werewolf. And, with the help of his Uncle Al, he takes a stand against the beast on the last day of the year.

Cycle of the Werewolf is a great werewolf story and is actually one of my favorite King stories, period. King was able to expand and dig deeper into the story when he wrote the screenplay for the 1985 film adaptation Silver Bullet... which also happens to rank as one of the best werewolf movies ever made, even though it’s not referenced as such very often.