Werewolf Movie, by Stephen St. Francis Decky

Even before the literal arrival of evil, a sense of dread suffuses our characters’ lives. The casual narration, which rotates first-person between the central cast, emphasizes menial tasks—making cheese sandwiches, working at the local movie theater—as if to avoid confronting what the characters really feel. An early scene with Rick and Gia, whose friendship has an unresolved romantic question mark, features the twosome on Rick’s porch in a prolonged goodbye. “But it’s almost like we’re saying something else,” narrates Rick. “I’m not sure what it is and I don’t think Gia does either, so neither of us actually comes out and says exactly what we’re thinking.” Rick and Gia keep their true thoughts at bay, unsatisfied and not sure why, a passive audience to the movie of their lives.

Creepy and compelling

They are thus a ripe target for Donnie, an unsettlingly smooth record label executive who shows up one night at one of Rick’s Philly shows. (I’d be remiss, writing this for Broad Street Review, if I didn’t mention Decky’s commitment to the novella’s Philadelphia setting, namedropping classic local music venues like Khyber and Dobbs.) Donnie claims to have an interest in Rick’s music, praising his talent as far beyond his peers, and wants to sign him to his label and make him a star. For someone who is supposedly a werewolf (the novella never explicitly defines what kind of monster he is), Donnie comes off as more vampiric in nature, both because of his suavity and the thematic nature of his mission. He is there, after all, to make use of our protagonists’ raw talents for his own gain; he is there to suck their blood.

What follows is a collection of creepy and compelling scenes, as Rick’s life devolves into a hallucinatory series of vignettes after his first meeting with Donnie. At first, he wonders if he got into some sort of car accident—why else would he have awoken with a strange wound on his stomach?—but any attempts at logic soon fall away. Images flash before us with the rhythm of a bad acid trip, turning the South Jersey locale into a nightmarish fantasia. Rick, Dale, and Frankie, in a thematic extension of their typical detachment, sleepwalk through a few particularly gruesome acts of violence, describing them as if they were watching a movie.

Haunting visions

There is some wobble to the central metaphor. If Donnie arrives as an exploitative force, why does he also amplify Rick’s musical skill, bestowing him with abilities beyond which he’d previously been capable of? After spending much of its second half unmoored from reality, the story also struggles to fully come back down to earth. Some of its literal consequences are left a little fuzzy, especially considering the string of bodies left in our characters’ wake.

Still, this is a short enough novella that it’s easy to forgive a few loose ends. What lingers, after all, are not any thematic quibbles, but the novella’s atmospheric succession of haunting visions—a horror that we can never quite grasp in full, and which resonates all the more for it.

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