Gary Brander - The Howling

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Gary Brander - The Howling (Hamlyn, 1978)

Michael Freeman

Blurb
Life had been good to Roy and Karyn Beatty. They were young, beautiful, healthy and rich ... Then came a horrible ordeal of urban savagery.
In order to forget it, they searched for a new home in a small woodland community away from the city. Drago was quiet, almost too quiet, but it offered peace and security.
It also harboured an age-old secret. and it was there that Roy and Karyn encountered another, more blood-chilling horror.

Dradja, a small rural community on the Greek-Bulgarian border, 1583. The gypsies terminate an outbreak of lycanthropy by slaughtering guilty and innocent alike before razing the village to the ground.

Hermosa Terrace, East Los Angeles, present day. It's Roy and Karyn Beatty first wedding anniversary and they are planning a small celebration for this evening. Karyn has a beautiful surprise for him - she's pregnant!

One person unlikely to receive an invite is Max Quist, the local handyman, an embittered jailbird who detests his neighbours for being younger, richer and happier than him. Worse, he just knows they look down on him as a social inferior! Time to teach them a lesson, starting with that snooty bitch across the way.

Two months later. Karyn lost the baby as a result of the beating she took when Quist raped her, and all the happiness has been sucked from their lives. Roy decides it's best they move away from the city, and settles on a property in Drago, a tiny woodland village in the Tehachapi Mountains. No smog, precious few people, just the one under-employed law-man, peace, quiet and only a two hour drive from his workplace. Just right to get their marriage back on track. Karyn isn't quite so sure. The folk round these parts seem very set in their ways, hardly the most welcoming, and Marcia Lura, glam proprietor of the local knick-knack store, isn't helping matters, mentally undressing Roy every time she sets cat-like eyes on him! Is her husband ever tempted to stray now that she can no longer fake ecstasy during love-making? Everyone says to give it time, but ... why can't things be as they were before that bastard Quist attacked her?

And then there's the howling in the night, every night, which Roy pretends not to hear.

Karyn wakes to another struggle of a day to find Lady, her loveable lap-dog, has gone missing.

[To be continued ...]

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Karyn doesn't care for Sheriff Anton Gadak. Truth be told, right now she doesn't like Roy either, the way both men patronise her over the unholy racket in the night ("it was an owl, at worst a coyote"). At least she has inadvertently made an ally. Determined to solve the twin mysteries of the blood-curdling howling/ dog disappearance, she orders four non-fiction titles on the North American wolf from the nearest library. Intrigued, Inez Polk, book-minder, drives over from Pinyon after work to deliver them in person. Inez is a former Carmelite nun with a keen interest in local history - and demonology. It's her belief that Drago harbours a werewolf, and just the merest glance at that chilling cover photo suggests she is on to something! Worse, if Inez is to believe there may be more than one, as those who survive it's bite are doomed to join the pack!

On top of everything else, this is not what Karyl needs to hear (Quist drew blood from my thigh with his teeth!), and, sensing the mood, Inez diplomatically makes her excuses for the evening.

So where's Roy while all this is going on? Away on an "urgent business meeting in LA" is where - i.e., sniffing around the "criminally beautiful" Marcia Lura. She suggests they go for a walk in the woods, evidently a local euphemism for bad-sex, although Roy will have to wait a while longer for that particular pleasure.

At least Karyn can put her mind at rest about what happened to the dog, because she's found her. Well, some of her, anyway.

As far as this forum is concerned, the comments on the late Mr. Brander's trilogy have not been unilaterally positive, but this reader invariably enjoys his work.

Photography: Michael Freeman

Return Of The Howling (Hamlyn, 1979)

Uncredited, but probably Photography: Michael Freeman?

Howling III: Echoes (Hamlyn, 1985)

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Things move apace. A likeable young backpacking couple come to grief in the woods. Rather than investigate, the sheriff has their van impounded. Karyn has survived a werewolf attack by blowing away half its face with a smart burst from husband's rifle. She and Inez confide their fears in the eminently trustworthy local GP, Dr. Volkmann, and enquire if he's bandaged any misshapen heads this morning. They need to find their loup garou before his or her missing ear grows back. The sheriff has taken over as number one suspect from Etienne Jolivet, creepy, taciturn husband of Oriole, the local jungle drums, who runs the general store and is possibly the only person in Drago to own a telephone. How Marcia Lura remains off Karyn's radar is a mystery considering she's the nearest thing the village has to a Goth.

Gary Brander's subsequent excursions into bad-sex always seemed perfunctory, but we can have no complaints on that score when Marcia and Ray finally get it on. It is to be hoped that Roy savoured the (very protracted) moment as it's the last extra-marital he'll enjoy as a mere human. Maybe Marcia might like to take a chance on Inez, whose past isn't as behing her as she thought. We learn that her departure from the convent was necessitated after she was discovered accidentally enjoying "delicious, forbidden caresses" with a young novitiate. And now she has the hots for Karyn. "Tonight she would read a very dull book until she fell asleep." Sounds like Anne Rice is gonna take another pounding. Just the sixty pages to go.

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Roy and Marcia round two, this time in their wolf guise. Roy celebrates by tearing the throat from a female motorist. If she but knew it, Karyn is now truly alone with the horrors and it will take an unlikely set of fortuitous circumstances/ the most implausible ending this side of Dennis Wheatley's Gateway To Hell to save her.

Could be that my memory is shot but, the way the books fell, I read the trilogy back to front without it ruining the experience in the least. The Howling is no The Werewolf of Paris, The Wolfen or The Night Walker, it's probably not even a second The Brain Eaters, but if you're looking for a slick, not especially challenging werewolf pulp romp, Gary Brander is the man for the job.