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Dinar Musa dinarvalee0b69 — Steve Lowe, Wolves Dressed As Men (Eternal Press, 2010) Dear Stephenie Meyer, Maggie Stiefvater, Jessica Coulter Smith, and, well, everyone back to, and maybe including, Whitley Streiber: this is how you write a werewolf novel. Or, given its length, the outline of one. But seriously, Steve Lowe just kicked all your butts around the room in a steel cage match, and you probably didn't even notice. Plot: there's a werewolf. He's not too happy with being a werewolf. (Okay, the rest of you lot got that part down.) There is also a Tracker, who's trying to kill the werewolf. (Most of you got that bit, too.) But this werewolf, who goes by the name of Thiess, is confused enough with his werewolf self that he's not acting like a regular werewolf, at least “regular” as defined by the tracker. Thiess lives in the big city, trying to blend in. He's infatuated with Maria, a co-worker (when was the last time one of your werewolves had, you know, a job?), and she's kind of drawn to him, too. Every day after work, he goes to St. Stanislaus, a local church, and begs God for forgiveness for the crimes he commits in wolf form, begs God to lift this affliction from him. You know how well that's going to work. But the longer Thiess is afflicted, the more of his humanity he loses. As a bonus hidden track, there's also a serial arsonist at work in the ghetto where Thiess lives, and he's becoming more and more active as Thiess gets worse. The cops are looking for Thiess, of course, and the arsonist as well in their spare time, but the guy who actually has a chance of finding him is a reporter, once an embedded war correspondent in Afghanistan, now reduced to writing trash articles for a local tabloid. (And if you've never seen the 1983 movie Strange Invaders, do it now. I'll wait. That goes triple if your name is Steve Lowe and you hit on this plot angle by sheer coincidence.) I've already mentioned the book's major weakness: its length. Wolves Dressed As Men reads far more like an outline than an actual novel. There's so, so, so much more that could have been done with this wonderful mix of characters and situations. The arsonist plotline, especially, is begging for a fuller treatment, and an examination of the parallel between werewolf and arsonist would have been endlessly fascinating, had it appeared. The conflict between the journalist and his buddy on the police force had a few great moments, and could have had much more. Imagine a confrontation between the police and the Tracker... I could go on like this for the rest of the review. This is a sixty-one-page book that could have been ten times as long, and Lowe (Muscle Memory) has the chops to make it work. On the other hand, what's here is as solid as they come. When you find yourself holding a book this small, what you expect to be leaving behind on the cutting room floor is characterization. And to be sure, these characters could have been more fully fleshed out, but Lowe used a lot of the space here to draw a few of his characters as well as anything you'll find in a major-label novel. The action is believable (as much as can be in a novel about a werewolf living in a ghetto, you understand), the pace is breakneck, the plot is as hooky as the premise would have you believe. I will continue to live in hope that Lowe eventually comes back to this story and turns it into the epic it so richly deserves to be. I'll buy it all over again, and be thankful for the opportunity, and if a six-hundred-page treatment of Wolves Dressed As Men is as good as a sixty-one-page treatment, there's no chance it won't show up on my best reads of the year list. Until then, I'll be glad I've got what I've got here. *** ½

Jean Correa corsaresth18fa — I hated this book while reading it. I was loathe to finish it, though as I did I giggled as reflective absurdity. Sadly, my friends seeking tenure now are experiencing similar dramas. Oy.

Mr Shurtliff mrshurtliff — Krakauer's books all center on some physical challenge that ends in disaster ad reproducing what steps led to the downfall. I read this after "Into Thin Air," story about the Everest tragedy. The style in identical, but told for a second-hand view this time. A great read.

Manuel Gallardo mangall — Easy read, great story to read to little girls!