Anne Rice: The Wolf Gift

[Anamnesis]

It seems like she'll be returning to her Gothic fiction/horror roots. I'm intrigued.

Anne Rice on The Wolf Gift, Coming February 2012 - YouTube

 

[canuck]

A gift? Really, really creeeeepy!

 

[Libra6Poe]

Exciting!

 

[WickedWitch]

Intriguing! This is going on my to-be-read list.

I was really surprised that the interview did not mention the werewolf books by Anne’s late sister, Alice Borchardt. Why did Anne not talk about that? Or maybe the editor thought that it was off topic, and removed it from the interview.

Alice Borchardt’s books are some of my all-time favorite books. I was bitterly disappointed that she never wrote the third book in the Guinevere series. She had fantastic characters and amazing plots in those books, and now I will never know what she had planned for Author and Lancelot and Guinevere.

 

[Fantasy Moon]

I like Borchardt's books better than Rice's. I'm wondering what werewolf movies she was watching for the transformation to be called a gift because every one I've ever seen referred to it as a curse from the get-go.

 

[Anamnesis]

Here's some information about the novel from Rice herself:

I eliminated the idea of the full moon controlling Reuben's transformation. That was key. I wanted a wholly new cosmology and origin story. The old werewolf material is magical, rather like the old vampire material. Vampires cannot be near garlic, cannot endure the sight of a cruxifix, must be in a coffin with their native soil in it, etc. The old werewolf changes during the full moon, remembers nothing. Well, I couldn't work with those limitations. If you introduce that kind of magic, the universe of the novel is too structured, too limited. I wanted Reuben wrestling with scientific questions about what's happening to him, what do hormones have to do with it, can it be controlled by strong will, etc. Of course he wonders if he is part of a moral plan, and if so, what that means. He can smell evil and he asks himself why that is. Is there a simple physical explanation for picking up the scent of the malicious, or it is this a moral given, and if so who has given him the power? To me that is the kind of complexity that makes a revival of the old classic horror monsters possible. But every author of supernatural novels today works out his or her own cosmology. The biggest change I've made, of course, is to see the transformation as a gift. Some werewolf films do speak of the "change" as a gift, but ultimately they play it out as a curse. For Reuben it is much more a gift than a curse.

Of course, I am thinking of sequel to The Wolf Gift. Not only are Reuben and the other characters alive for me, so is Nideck Point, the beautiful old house in which they live. I have to get back to all that.

Source: this Two-part interview