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The Wolfman Kindle Edition
Marlowe Higgins has had a hard life. Since being dishonorably discharged after a tour in Vietnam, he's been in and out of prison, moving from town to town, going wherever the wind takes him. He can't stay in one place too long--every full moon he kills someone.
Marlowe Higgins is a werewolf. For years he struggled with his affliction, until he found a way to use this unfortunate curse for good--he only kills really bad people.
Settling at last in the small town of Evelyn, Higgins works at a local restaurant and even has a friend, Daniel Pearce, one of Evelyn's two police detectives.
One night everything changes. It turns out Marlowe Higgins isn't the only monster lurking in the area. A fiendish serial killer, known as the Rose Killer, is brutally murdering young girls all around the county. Higgins targets the killer as his next victim, but on the night of the full moon, things go drastically wrong. . . .
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTor Books
- Publication dateMay 13, 2008
- File size411 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Review
"The too-short life of Nicholas Pekearo was both triumph and tragedy. He died a hero's death, sacrificing his own life to save others. And now comes The Wolfman, a brilliant, insightful, overpowering debut from a writer who studied, listened, and learned before he took his shot...and centered the bulls-eye. Published posthumously, this "debut" novel is a triumph."--Andrew Vachss
"Consider Lon Chaney Jr. meets The Incredible Hulk--as imagined by Charles Bukowski. The Wolfman's great fun. My suggestion? Don't wait for the next full moon. Pounce!"--Jack Ketchum
"The Wolfman takes a tried and true wooly-booger icon and turns it on its ear and gives it a fresh coat of fur and new sheen on its very sharp teeth. Nicholas Pekearo has the wolf chops and the writing chops to make this horror/thriller a must read."--Joe R. Lansdale
About the Author
NICHOLAS PEKEARO was a young, prolific writer who left the world too soon. While volunteering as an NYPD Auxillary Police Officer, he was killed in the line of duty, in the very neighborhood he grew up in, New York City's Greenwich Village. The Wolfman is his first published novel.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I am a man who is apt to have bad dreams. In my dreams I am not falling, or drowning, or even being roasted on a spit or some such thing by the Vietcong, who, at the time of the war, were rumored to do piss-awful things like that to the boys they caught.
My dreams are a little more fucked than that. I have no soul, and the godforsaken beast that had replaced it does more than take lives. It takes their spirits. So when I plop myself down on my lumpy mattress at night and go to sleep, I don’t dream like normal people do. Instead, I experience the memories of people who aren’t around anymore to remember their own histories. What makes a dream bad isn’t reliving how they died; it’s remembering how much my victims loved the men, women, and children they left behind in this world. In my dreams I miss these widows and children as if I knew them. I have been responsible for the deaths of over three hundred people over the years. Consequently my nightmares are legion.
On the morning of May 1, I awoke from one of my bad dreams because the radio alarm clock went off by my head like a gunshot. I was cold but sweating, and that wasn’t unusual. I looked around the room to get my bearings. It took a second to remember where I was, what year it was. I soon came to recognize my bedroom, and a razor slice of a grin appeared on my face because Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” was playing on KBTO, but, aside from that one saving grace, it was another day in the life that no one in their right mind would ask for.
A thin sliver of sunlight came in through the curtains and burned on the floor like the glowing edge of a heated knife. There were two windows in the bedroom. One was facing east, the other south. I had nailed the both of them shut when I moved in. The air smelled like old and rotting books. A combination of water damage and a few hundred old newspapers stacked up in the guest room helped create this scent, which was far preferable to how the house used to smell. I pulled back the damp sheets and stumbled across the creaking floorboards to the bedroom door. The door was closed, and I had a quarter balanced on the doorknob and a glass ashtray on the floor below it, so if anyone jiggled the handle at night, I’d know it by the noise of the coin dropping into the ashtray. I palmed the quarter, stuffed it into the pocket of the shorts I wore to bed, and moved the ashtray aside with my foot. Then I went down the short hallway to the bathroom.
I had a quarter resting on the bathroom doorknob as well, just in case anyone snuck in through the bathroom window. The bathroom window was the only one in the entire house that wasn’t permanently sealed, because I liked opening it when I did my business. It helped more than you could ever imagine. If I ever crap on a plane, all those funny little masks would probably drop down in the aisles.
I jumped in and out of the shower to wash away the sweat, and when I got out I combed my long, awesome hair, which at the time came down to the middle of my back. Looking at my face up close in the mirror, I decided to do a little tidy-up work on my handlebar mustache. I saw a couple of gray hairs in there that I didn’t believe should be so eager to come to fruition. I was forty years old, but a history of longevity ran in my nasty blood—despite the two packs I smoked a day—and grays in the face seemed to me to be redundant little creatures that hadn’t earned their place yet.
My little house on King Street was down on the southwestern edge of town, constructed at the very end of a cul-de-sac. The houses were spaced far enough away from each other that I had never felt obligated to say hello to the poor fools who had the misfortune of living to my left and to my right. My house was what they call ranch-style, and it was made of wood so gnarled by time that it looked like it was made of boards that fell off other houses. All the glass in the windows was rippled. Out front was a little driveway—no garage—and a few bushes I never trimmed. They looked like afros in the wind. Out back I had a dead tree that my neighbors always bitched about because they were worried it would fall down in a bad storm, but I liked my dead tree. You could always see the birds crapping from its limbs with that blank look in their eyes, and the squirrels running all around its girth as they played their daredevil games. Further, I liked it because it would be impossible for a sniper to hide in it.
The woman who used to live in the house had been very old before she died. Or maybe it would be better to say that she was very goddamn old by the time she kicked off, but the point of it all is that she’d had cats. A lot of fucking cats. I’m told that when she died in that house, those cats went to work on her after a few days of having no other source of food. Sometimes I swore that I could still smell her deep in the fabric of the couch.
Her son, who lived over in Edenburgh, decided to rent the place instead of selling it outright, and when I moved in about three years prior, it took me a long time to keep those cats from coming around all the time. There were holes in the walls and in the floor where they’d sneak in, but I eventually found all those holes and sealed them up. I didn’t want any cats in my house, especially cats that had supped on human flesh. Even though it had been years since I’d gotten them all out, it was as if their phantoms lived on, because whenever I turned my head, the furniture would be covered with clumps of orange hair. It was unbelievable. I always wondered if there was a hole somewhere that I didn’t know about, or if those ornery little bastards had a set of keys for the front door.
After checking all the windows, I put on a pair of jeans and slipped my skull-and-crossbones belt through the loops. I put on a Sabbath shirt, a flannel over that, and then I laced up my construction boots. I grabbed my keys, locked the four locks on my front door, and got in the truck—a blue 1983 Chevy flatbed. There were so many rusted-out holes in it that it looked like some hunters had mistaken the truck for an elephant and emptied their scatterguns into it.
I turned the key and cursed. Doing these two things at the same time was almost like a prayer in and of itself, because God came down every morning to help make the piece of shit move. The engine groaned like it had arthritis, and I headed out. I drove to the corner and took Picket Street east—a quiet, tree-lined street of one-story homes and the occasional nursery or doctor’s office. There wasn’t another car on the road as far as I could see. It was very early, and anyone who was up at the time was probably at church, where, as I understood it, they gave people free coffee.
I wasn’t quite awake yet. I was picking at this piece of sleepy-sand in the corner of my eye that didn’t want to go. I was picking at it so much that it began to irritate me like a sonofabitch. It just got worse and worse. I shut my eyes real tight, and when I opened them up again, I saw that damn Indian in the middle of the road up ahead with that damn plastic bag slumped over his shoulder, full of all the cans he had picked up off the streets, like a bum.
That woke me up real quick.
I hit the brakes and jerked the wheel left. I missed him by a foot, if that, though I don’t know why I was so merciful. I stopped the truck and gave him the evil eye through the open passenger window. He was in a dirty black suit that he must have taken from a dead body. On his feet was a pair of cowboy boots.
He wasn’t a young man. He seemed practically ancient, but his age was anyone’s guess. His white hair was as long as mine, and in a ponytail. He looked back at me like he thought the whole thing was a fucking joke. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, me almost hitting him with the truck.
“Hey, you old bastard,” I yelled out the window, “what the fuck are you doing?”
My general distrust and hostility toward the natives was genetic in origin in the sense that my singular disorder evidently stems from a deranged red man whose vicious streak lives on through me. More presently, I had never had a good encounter with a native. Wherever I went, I felt as if they could smell the curse I carried inside of me, almost as if they saw me in a way that no one else could, could observe the inhumanity lurking beneath my flesh, and they hated me for not only what I was but why I was as well. Or at least that’s how it felt.
In his halted way of speaking, the Indian responded, “What . . . does it look like?”
“Looks like you have a death wish,” I replied. “Stay off the road. Next time, I won’t swerve to miss you.”
He pointed his sawed-off broomstick with the nail hammered through one end at me like it was a baton and said, “You have more important things to worry about . . . than me, paleface.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I ain’t too tired to take you to town, old man.” I felt like getting out of the truck to clobber the sonofabitch. “You looking for trouble?”
“No, no,” he said. “Trouble . . . is yours to find. Not mine.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Arright, you cryptic bastard,” I mumbled. “You want to talk like that, fine. Just stay off the fucking road.”
He smiled. I flipped him the bird and took off. I drove north on Hamilton Road to this little newsstand just off Main Street. I said hi to Gus, the old fellow who owned the place, and...
Product details
- ASIN : B0011UCOZW
- Publisher : Tor Books; Reprint edition (May 13, 2008)
- Publication date : May 13, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 411 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 287 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #998,954 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #868 in Horror Fiction Classics
- #1,789 in U.S. Horror Fiction
- #4,209 in Ghost Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
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The novel read like a strange mash-up of the hard-boiled detective fiction of Jim Thomson, the serial killer as avenger show Dexter, and the gritty rural realism of Joe R. Landsdale. It's a mash-up straight from heaven… or from the fires of Hell, if you prefer. The novel's narrator, a
Vietnam veteran with a troubled past, serves as a rather unique amateur private eye… for he also just happens to be a werewolf. Haunted by a family curse, Marlowe Higgins has drifted across the country for years, trying to reign in his monthly lycanthropic violence and limit the damage done to the innocent. He is a character haunted deeply by the grisly deeds in his past, determined to harm no innocent souls if he can manage, keeping as much to himself as he can. But then after landing a job at a diner in a small Tennessee town and finding a reasonable peace, he becomes embroiled in the horrific legacy left by a savage serial killer… the perfect target for his inner beast.
Higgins is a wonderfully drawn character, a man trying to live with an abominable curse as best he can in a world that would never believe in his malady. He is imperfect, deeply flawed in fact, but his heartbreaking history of suffering through the monthly transformations without hope for an end while he struggles desperately to kill only the worst, most predatory members of society is heartbreaking. In a genre far too often populated by cardboard cut-out characters, Higgins stands out as a character to be feared, pitied, and rooted for.
As a detective novel alone, the book sings loudly. It's a breathtaking mystery with enough twists and turns to satisfy any mystery fan. And the full moon horror of the protagonist werewolf is counterbalanced by the atrocities committed of the man known only as The Rose Killer, a serial killer who intentionally preys on the weak and innocent. I just can't praise the stunning virtuosity of Pekearo's writing enough… and all I can say is buy this book and read it as soon as you can.
As a sad end note, author Pekearo was killed in the line of duty shortly before the book's publication in his role as an NYPD Auxiliary Officer. The savage act of a real-life criminal monster cut short his life at so young an age. Who knows what more fine contributions Pekearo could have made to the horror genre if he had lived.
That being said, this is an outstanding book once you look past these things. Mr. Pekearo has an original vision and story. He takes the basics of the werewolf mythology and adds his own modern spin to them. Mr. Pekearo (per the introduction) had the idea of continuing this as a series which would work out similarly to the 1970s Incredible Hulk t.v. show. A self-isolating loner who is forced to wander the country without putting down roots due to his “special” circumstances.
I enjoyed the book immensely as it is a thoroughly modern take on werewolves. It takes the werewolf out of the forest and drops him into the middle of rural suburbia. It kept me reading due to the excellent use of suspense. A serial killer is on the loose and the werewolf has taken it on himself to rid the world of said serial killer, if he can only find out who it is. (Like a supernatural Dexter?)
Overall, I recommend this book to those who like mysteries with a supernatural twist. I agree with the other reviewers that the mystery was easy to figure out, but I overlooked this as the book was never fully finished. Turning the book into a series was a great idea and would have been something to look forward to.
The book is great. From the minute I started reading the prologue, I couldn't stop reading. The "detective werewolf" descriptor isn't quite accurate but I've no interest in going further than that for fear of spoiling any of the story. The characterization was amazing and the dialogue real. It's a wonderful glimpse into corruption within small town, and every once in a while small parts jump out at you that say, "That was gonna show up in a future sequel." My only complaint was that I figured out who the villain was with 100 pages to spare - but I didn't figure everything out, there were still many surprises I didn't expect, and the climax was impressive and satisfying.
I'm very thankful I got this book. And, selfishly, I'm heartbroken the hands and mind that brought this book won't be responsible for followups to it. There's so much more could be done with this character and his world, but I don't know if anyone else would do it justice.
If you love detective fiction, or a good bit of noir mixed with horror, pick this up.
Top reviews from other countries
Well, the author does it quite fast himself, and readers used
to this kind of litterature will have spotted the key to the novel
easily too.
Though, it is pleasant to follow the hero all through it, not the less
for his sense of wit. Not only does he meet Dexter, but Bukowsky too.
Yet, critics fainting to the author's (RIP) genius seems a bit overreacted,
in my modest opinion.
This is a great debut novel from a very promising young writer. The story is told entirely from the point of view of Marlowe Higgins which is great because it allows the reader to understand the character and his motivations so much better. The pace of the story is pretty fast and packed with an equal amount of action, drama, sex and twisted humour.
As with most debut novels there is room for improvement in a couple of areas but on the whole it's a great book and shows that Nicholas Pekearo had the potential to become a great writer with an eye for detail and the ability to create some memorable characters as well as creating some great new ideas for the werewolf genre.