What child doesn’t enjoy a good werewolf story? As a kid, I would be allowed to stay up past my bedtime if, for instance, “The Werewolf of London” were being shown on TV. I still own a book on werewolves my parents bought me on one our trips to FAO Schwarz in the mid-‘70s.
While I can’t claim to be werewolf-crazy in a post-“Twilight” world, I do still enjoy a classic monster tale well-told (hence, Classic Ross Amico).
“Wagner the Werewolf” (no relation to the composer) was one of at least three enormously popular penny dreadfuls to appear in the mid-1840s. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, penny dreadfuls were serialized, quite lurid tales designed to appeal to the increasingly literate working class. They were calculated page-turners, presenting a rogues gallery of highwaymen, murderers and supernatural creatures. One of these, “The String of Pearls,” begun in 1846, introduced the character of Sweeney Todd.
“Wagner” is an outrageous piece of bait-and-switch, an alleged werewolf tale which begins with an appearance by Johannes Faust, no less, who turns up in the storm-swept Black Forest of Germany to offer an aged shepherd an offer he can’t refuse. Naturally, it comes with a few fanged, furry strings attached.
Thereafter, any reader who bought the book based on the title hungrily pushes forward expecting an appearance of the horrid beast. He will have to wait a good long while, until page 62, in fact. Then again, until page 198. Then page 303. After a while, one begins to wonder, where wolf? It almost becomes a kind of in-joke, between the reader and himself.
When the wolf does show up, he generally dashes somebody’s brains out (usually by accident), though come to think of it, he does scoop up an unsuspecting child in front of his horrified parents. Oh yeah, and he tramples some swans. Other than that, he just runs really, really fast.
I know, no spoiler alert. But face it, if you read this book for the werewolf, you’re not going to be satisfied. Fortunately, the author, George W.M. Reynolds, couches his werewolf subplot in a labyrinthine tale of Renaissance intrigue, complete with swaggering banditti, sadistic nuns, Ottoman ambition, demonic visitations, and a real corker of a villainess, who in a way is also the novel’s heroine.
Lady Nisida, who plays deaf and dumb for much of the book, is quite a creation, ruthless, cunning and hopelessly in love with Wagner – a well-rounded figure (in more ways than one, as Reynolds is careful to describe nearly every time she appears).
She is easily the most compelling character in the book. You’ll find yourself pulling for her and the newly rejuvenated, fabulously wealthy Wagner – when she isn’t stabbing someone to death in the basement, that is. At least her heart is in the right place, and most of her evil deeds can be attributed to familial loyalty.
It’s interesting, too, to note Reynolds’ sympathetic treatment of the Jew Isaachar, who’s shown to be afraid much of the time (for good reason), but is given a nobility of character that is rare in Victorian fiction. Sure he’s subjected to terrible cruelty, but he’s a far cry from the usual hook-nosed moneylender. The Church, on the other hand, comes in for some pretty sound drubbings.
I confess I began the book with reservations. The first chapter is full of the kind of sentence fragments and abuse of punctuation that makes that other monstrous penny dreadful, “Varney the Vampire,” so painful to read. However, once he takes flight, Reynolds is a pretty fine storyteller. For all its obvious crudity and making-it-up-as-I-go shortcomings, “Wagner the Werewolf” is a ripping good yarn. I found myself thinking in places it was like Alexandre Dumas light.
Finally, it’s always sobering to look back on the “trash” of another era and find it to be probably too high-flown for the average reader of today. That’s a curse less likely to be broken than lyncanthropy.
