lonely werewolf girl

(ETA: Here is a good review of Lonely Werewolf Girl that actually describes the plot, in case anyone's interested.)

Last night, as I was curled up reading, it occurred to me that entering a PhD program is really going to put a cramp on my young adult fantasy fiction addiction.

It’s been a while since I read a piece of adult realistic fiction that I got excited about. I don’t why this is, exactly. I’m constantly hearing about novels that I think sound like something I should read, but whenever I go into the adult fiction section of the library, I end up wandering the aisles listlessly, unable to generate an interest in anything. Plus I’m on an indefinite hiatus from reading books about relationships in which men are assholes and women are exploited and disempowered, which knocks out about half of it. The last adult novel (and I mean plain old adult, not adult wink-wink nudge-nudge say-no-more) that I really got into was The Monsters of Templeton, which, despite the relatively non-fantastical human storyline, also featured an enormous, quasi-metaphorical fish monster.

I have no idea what’s happened to me. When I was a teenager, I wasn’t reading fantasy or anything in the YA aisle. I didn’t read anything specifically geared towards “young readers” after the age of twelve or thirteen. Instead, I confused the hell out of myself reading Ellen Gilchrist, Francine du Plessix Gray, Iris Murdoch, and God knows what else. I just went into General Fiction and grabbed things, and no one stopped me. I now find it hilarious that I read Lovers and Tyrants in my early teens, before I had a clue about either one. These days I’d find such a book about as compelling as a manual of baseball statistics.

Before going to Long Beach last month, I scoured the young adult fiction aisle of Borders, looking for travel reading. The pickings were slim. The doorstop-sized Twilight its endless spawn took up about a third of the shelves, and another third was taken up with a parade of slutty Twilight knockoffs, their glossy black goth covers adorned with flowing black tresses, bare white necks, and various other pieces of silvery cheap dime-store vampire symbolism. The rest of the section was full of things like Preppy Bitch Academy Series 236. There were a few good books by Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and Terry Pratchett, but I’ve read those already.

I had better luck at the library, where I made my own doorstop-sized find: Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar, the book that consumed three of my days in Long Beach and fulfilled every requirement for good travel reading and then some. I suppose this book would fall into the category of “urban fantasy,” a sub-genre that I haven’t really explored. If there were a continuum for fantasy stories, and at one end was the word “luminous,” and at the other end was the word “gritty,” urban fantasy would, as you might guess, be more towards the latter end.

This is certainly the case with Lonely Werewolf Girl, which features a homeless, illiterate, suicidal, anorexic, laudanum-addicted, borderline sociopathic seventeen-year-old werewolf girl named Kalix MacRinnalch. (Yes, laudanum. It’s out with poets, but apparently the wolves still dig it.) The book begins with her staggering through London, alone and delirious. Her family, a pack of power-hungry Scottish werewolves with a big old castle, has disowned her. Some of them are trying to kill her. Every time they make a move in that direction, however, she explodes into a murderous wolfy rage, dispensing with her assassins, fueled by nothing but anger, drugs, and werewolf mojo. Kalix doesn’t really want to be alive, but somehow she stays that way, and eventually is sort of okay with that. The plot—the plot is way too complicated to describe. It’s fast-paced and gripping, and there are literally dozens of compelling characters involved, but Kalix’s confused fight for survival is its power core.

I’m not sure I would have been able to tolerate Kalix’s story when I was seventeen myself. If this book had been around in 1994, and had I managed to pick it up, I probably would have put it down after three or four chapters. Kalix is so intense, so angry, so unlikable, and so self-destructive; I imagine that the teenaged me would have found her an excessive character, even without the werewolf thing. Which is backward, when you think about it. Young adult fiction often has protagonists in the grips of extreme emotions and experiences, and it’s generally the job of adults to find these things excessive and unrelatable, isn’t it?

But when I was seventeen, I didn’t have any friends who were on the brink of destroying themselves. By the time I graduated from college, I did. I know well by now what that looks like. If I met a real-life Kalix, I wouldn’t want to be near her, I’m sure. The last time I discovered a friend was a drug addict, I ended the friendship right there, too exhausted and frightened by my previous experiences with addicted friends to let that dark energy into my life again. Kalix has people in her life who play a role that I’ve played, trying to save someone who seems hell-bent on dying. If the story itself weren’t a fantasy, I doubt I’d be able to bear reading it.

But this is why I’ve come to love fantasy—because something about the unreal surroundings allows me to go places that I’m too overwhelmed to go in so-called realistic fiction. Kalix is a werewolf. That fact gives me some distance from her story; it lets me step into her world with a layer of protection. When fantasy is good, no matter how dark, it feeds a sense of hope and anticipation in me that acts as a buffer against the usual despair prompted by stories of violent and/or self-destructive people. Most fantasy works from the premise that redemption is possible. Maybe that’s why I crave it.


(P.S.: I know that none of us needs more evidence that the Christian Right is stupid, but still, I find it hilarious that they raised such a stink about Harry Potter when there is stuff like this on the YA shelves sliding under the radar. Furthermore, they didn’t even notice the aspects of Harry Potter that might actually be subversive and/or threatening to their politics—they just got their chaste white panties in a bunch over the effing witchcraft. For God’s sake, how many books on the YA shelf feature witchcraft? It’s a good thing these people are so culturally clueless, or they’d be banning half of the damn library. Lonely Werewolf Girl has a smattering of witchcraft, but you hardly notice it for all the other depraved behavior going on: blood feuds, bounty hunting, substance abuse, and lashings of ill-advised sex.)