Hey kids, welcome back to The Book Report.

In his 1981 non-fiction novel Danse Macabre, about the genre of horror and the different mediums it appears in, Stephen King mentions the three main archetypes of the Horror genre: Vampires, Werewolves, and The Thing Without a Name. Looking at it in a broader sense, you could say vampires represent the person or thing killing you that you know. The Thing Without a Name represents the thing killing you but you don’t know what it is. Werewolves represent the thing killing us that is ourselves.

The origin of werewolves in literature is fairly recent. There are stories of humans changing into wolves going back as far as the medieval romances, such as Marie de France’s Bisclavret written in the 12th Century. But the actual folklore behind werewolves is slightly different.
The word “werewolf” comes from the Old English “wer” — meaning man — and “wulf” — from which we get the modernized spelling of “wolf” but back then generally meant “beast”. The image of this “man-beast” did not really gain popularity until the gothic novels of the 19th Century. “Penny dreadfuls” — short, serialized horror stories (essentially 19th Century comic books without all the pictures) — popularized the werewolf figure with such serials as Hugues, the Wer-Wolf and Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (along with Varny the Vampire for vampire stories).
The first full novels about werewolves came from the French, with Alexander Dumas’ 1857 work The Wolf-Leader (which was not translated into English until the early 1900s) and Erkmann-Chatrian’s 1869 work The Man-Wolf (translated to English in 1971).

For a closer look at the thematic struggle of the evil within us, I want to look at Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 “werewolf” novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

In late 1885, Stevenson’s wife woke him from a nap because of cries of horror coming from him in the midst of his dream. Upon waking, he asked his wife, “Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.” He went on to use the images from that dream to explore the interplay of good and evil and the idea of human duality in the characters of Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr. Edward Hyde.

The book was an immediate success. Within a year of publication, stage adaptations of the story began to appear in Boston and London. Not including stage and radio plays of the story, over 120 film adaptations of the story have been made, though none of them remained faithful to the source material. The strange duo also appeared in comic book form, in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

If you managed somehow to never have heard of the story, I apologize for the spoilers. Most film adaptions cast Jekyll and Hyde with the same actor and shoot the story from the doctor’s (and his creation’s) viewpoint. This completely destroys the mystery of the novel, however.
The plot of the story follows Mr. Utterson, a lawyer, and he tries to discover what strange connection the diabolical Edward Hyde has with his friend, the elderly Dr. Jekyll. Of course, given the popularity of the story, there’s no mystery to the story anymore, but the novella uses anticipation to fine effect to build tension.
The story is barely 100 pages, and the first twenty are spent discussing Mr. Hyde and the effect he has on people before we ever meet him. And it is not until after we meet Mr. Hyde that we meet Dr. Jekyll.

Because, for most readers today, the story isn’t a mystery, the interesting parts of the story to examine deal precisely the psychological attractiveness of human duality that make most werewolf stories so interesting. An interesting thing to keep in mind is this story came out about fifteen years before Freud’s books on psychoanalysis.

So, on the next full moon, give the book a read (or re-read). It’s one of Stevenson’s most popular stories for a reason.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_