Werewolf. This item is unavailable.Werewolf

One of the few survivors of a sneak attack on his bleak, poverty-stricken homeworld of Carescria, Wilf Brim is given the opportunity to attend the academy, taking on his first assignment as Sublieutenant Wilf Ansor Brim, Helmsman of the I.F.S. Truculent. Reprint.

Atmospheric boy-werewolf horror novel set against the London blitz. This is an inspired idea carried out through a less-than- gripping tale. In 1930, Detective Constable George Llewellyn leads a raid on a Gypsy camp on Smiths Common, which seems to have a regular abortionist, and where a pregnant woman gives birth during the raid to a full-term but ``deformed'' baby that causes that Gypsy abortionist to put the Evil Eye on Llewellyn: ``I curse you down the generations.'' Ten years later, the Battle of Britain is underway, with much of the story taking place as people crawl over all-present rubble and Nazi bombs light up the night. By now Llewellyn is a widower with his own coma-ridden or catatonic daughter under care in a special hospital--while Smiths Common is burdened by a rash of fresh corpses that suggests that some terrible wild beast is eating people, or parts of them. Llewellyn, now a detective sergeant, finds a bricked-up room in the basement of a derelict building where something has been manacled to a wall while being fed rats, cats, dogs, and Lord knows what-all, judging from the pile of bones in the stinking room. The reader is soon aware that a demented ten-year-old boy werewolf, the deformed baby Llewellyn, has escaped and is prowling the rubble. At the same time, a natural history of the werewolf is uncovered by Nevil Stimpson, an occultist of middle years, and through him the history of werewolves now in England. The climax is a chase through the rubble, the vicious boy werewolf hiding in pipes and Llewellyn reeling under his curse. The blacked-out rubble and impending bloodshed, as well as the slurp-slurp-crunch-crunch of the feeding werewolf, have their reading joys, but step-by-step police procedure fails to energize the storytelling. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.