The Werewolf Howls by Clifford Ball

[00:00:01][music] >> Everybody dies, don't they?

[00:00:10]Everybody come back, don't they?

[00:00:13]Isn't that so?

[00:00:14]>> [music] >> You tried to get into the locked room today, didn't you?

[00:00:18]>> How do they come back, mother?

[00:00:20]What's the secret of it?

[00:00:22]>> The Werewolf Howls by Clifford Ball.

[00:00:27]Twilight had come upon the slopes of the vineyards, and a gentle caressing breeze drifted to the open casement to stir into further disorder the papers upon the desk where Monsieur Etienne de la Croix was diligently applying himself.

[00:00:43]He raised his leonine head, the hair of which had in his later years turned to gray, and stared vacantly from beneath bushy brows at the formation of a wind-driven cloud, as if he thought that the passive elements of the heavens could, if they so desired, aid him in some momentous decision.

[00:01:02]It was a light but firm tap on the door which led to the hall of the chateau.

[00:01:06]Monsieur de la Croix blinked as his thoughts were dispersed and in some haste gathered various documents together and thrust them into the mouth of a large envelope before bidding the knocker to enter.

[00:01:18]Pierre, his eldest son, came quietly into the room.

[00:01:21]The father felt a touch of pride he could never quite subdue when Pierre approached, for he had great faith in his son's probity as well as an admiration for the straight carriage and clear eye he at his own age could no longer achieve.

[00:01:35]Of late he had been resting a great many matters pertaining to the management of the Chateau Dore and the business of its vineyards which supported the estate on the broad shoulders poised before him.

[00:01:46]But Etienne de la Croix had been born in the strict household and his habits fashioned in a stern school and was the lineal descendant of ancestors who had planted their peasants' feet, reverently but independently, deep in the soil of France. So, visible emotions were to him a betrayal of weakness.

[00:02:05]There was no trace of the deep regard he felt for his son evident when he addressed the younger man.

[00:02:10]"Where are your brothers? Did I not ask you to return with them?"

[00:02:14]"They're here, Father. I entered first to be certain that you were ready to receive us."

[00:02:19]But the mentor, Jacques and Francois came in to stand with their elder brother and were careful to remain a few inches in his rear. He was the acknowledged spokesman.

[00:02:29]Their greetings were spoken simultaneously, Jacques' voice breaking off in a high note which caused him obvious embarrassment, for he was adolescent.

[00:02:39]Together, thought Monsieur Delacroix, they represented three important steps in his life, three payments on account to posterity. He was glad his issue had all been males. Since the early death of his wife, he'd neither cared for any woman or taken any interest in anything feminine.

[00:02:56]"I have here, my son, some papers of importance," he announced, addressing Pierre. "As you observe, I'm placing them here where you may easily obtain them in the event of my absence."

[00:03:07]Suiting the action to the word, he removed the bulky envelope to withdraw in the desk and turned its key, allowing the tiny piece of metal to remain in its lock. "I'm growing older." His fierce, challenging eyes swept the trio as if he dared a possible contradiction.

[00:03:22]"And it is best that you are aware of these documents, which are relative to the business of the chateau." "No, no," chorused all three, "You are as young as ever, Papa." "Sacre bleu! Do you name me a liar, my children? Attends, Pierre."

[00:03:37]"Yes Yes, Papa."

[00:03:39]"I have work for you this night."

[00:03:41]The elder son's forehead wrinkled. "But the work, it is over. Our tasks are completed. The workers have been checked. The last cart is in the shed."

[00:03:50]"This is a special task. One which requires the utmost diligence of you all. It is of the wolf. The werewolf, exclaimed Jacques, crossing himself. The other brothers remained silent, but mingled expressions of wonder and dislike passed across their features. Ever since the coming of the wolf, the topic of its depredations had been an unwelcome one in the household of the Chateau Doré.

[00:04:17]Mon Dieu, Jacques, exploded the head of the house. Have you two been listening to the old wives' tales? Must you be such an imbecile at I, your father?

[00:04:26]Rubbish, there can be no werewolves. Has not the most excellent Father Cormac flouted such stories 10,000 times? It is a common wolf, a large one, true, but nevertheless a common mongrel, a beast from the distant mountain. Of its ferocity we are unfortunately well aware, so it must be dispatched with the utmost alacrity. But the workers say Papa that there have been no wolves in the fields for more than 100. Pest! The ever verbose workers. The animal is patently a vagrant, a stray beast driven from the mountains by the lash of its hunger, and I, Etienne de la Croix, have pronounced that it must die.

[00:05:09]The father passed a heavy hand across his forehead, for he was weary from his unaccustomed labor over the accounts.

[00:05:16]His hands trembled slightly, the result of an old nervous disorder.

[00:05:20]The fingers were thick and blunt from all the hardy toil of earlier years. The blue veins were still corded from the strength which he had once possessed. It is well, said Pierre in his own level tone, since the wolf came upon and destroyed poor little Marguerite Destour, tearing her throat to shreds, and the gendarme who almost cornered it were unable to stop it because they could not shoot straight, and it persists in It slashed the shoulder of old Gavroche, who was feeble he cannot walk without two canes," interrupted Francois excitedly.

[00:05:52]"Ravaging our ewes," concluded the single-minded Pierre, who was not to be sidetracked once he had chosen his way, whether in speech or action.

[00:06:01]"The damage to our flocks has been great, papa. It is just that we should take action since the police have failed.

[00:06:07]I have thought this wolf strange, too, although I place no faith in demons.

[00:06:13]If it but seeks food, why must it slay so wantonly and feed so little?

[00:06:19]It is indeed like a great gray demon in appearance. Twice I have viewed it leaping across the meadows in the moonlight, its long gray legs hurling it an unbelievable distance at every bound.

[00:06:30]And Marie Polidor of the kitchens found its tracks only yesterday at the very gates of the chateau. I have been told," revealed Jacques, flinging his hands about in adolescent earnestness, "that the wolf is the beast soul of one who has been stricken by the moon demons. By day, he is as other men, but by night, he is one with whom we walk and talk little guessing his dreadful affliction." "Silence!" roared Monsieur Delacroix.

[00:07:00]One of his clenched fists struck the desk a powerful blow, and the sons were immediately quieted. "Must I listen to the ranting and raving and drivelling of fools and imbeciles?

[00:07:11]Am I not still the master of the Chateau d'Ore? I will tend to the accursed matters I have always, will I not? I have always seen to the welfare of the dwellers in the shadow of the Chateau d'Ore, and with the help of the good God I shall continue to do so until the last drop of my blood has dried away from my bones. Do you comprehend?"

[00:07:33]In a quieter tone, after the enforced silence, he continued, "I have given orders to both the foreman and Monsieur the mayor that this night, the night of the full moon, by which we may detect the marauder, all the people of the vineyards and of the town beyond must remain locked behind windows and barred doors.

[00:07:51]If they have obeyed my orders, and may the good God look after those who have not, they are even now secure in the safety of their respective homes. Let me discover but one demented idiot picking from behind his shutter, and I promise you, he shall have cause to remember his disobedience.

[00:08:08]Pierre nodded without speaking, knowing he was being instructed a possible but improbable offender.

[00:08:15]Now, we are four intelligent men, I trust, said Monsieur Delacroix, pretending not to notice the glow of pleasure which suffused Jacques' features at being included in their number. We are the Delacroix, which is sufficient. And as leaders, we must, from time to time, grant certain concessions to the inferior mentalities of the unfortunate who dwell in ignorance.

[00:08:39]So, I have this day promised the good foreman who petitioned me regarding the activities of this wolf to perform certain things. They firmly believe the gray wolf is a demon, an inhuman atrocity visited upon us by the evil one, and also, according to their ancient but childish witch law, that it may only be destroyed by a silver weapon.

[00:08:59]Monsieur Delacroix reached beneath his chair and drew forth a small but apparently heavy sack.

[00:09:05]Upending it on the surface of the desk, he scattered in every direction a double dozen glittering cylindrical objects.

[00:09:12]Bullets, exclaimed Jacques. Silver bullets, amended Pierre. Yes, my son.

[00:09:20]Bullets of silver which I molded myself in the cellars, and which I have shown to the men with the promise that they will be put to use.

[00:09:27]Expensive weapons, commented the thrifty Francois.

[00:09:31]It is the poor peasants' belief if we slew this wolf with mere lead or iron, they would still be frightened of their own shadows and consequently worthless at their work as they have been for the past month here at the guns.

[00:09:43]Tonight you will go forth my sons and slay this fabulous werewolf and cast its carcass upon the cartload of dry wood I have had piled by the vineyard road and burn it until there is nothing left but the ash for all to see and to know.

[00:09:59]Yes, papa ascended Pierre and Francois as one.

[00:10:02]But the boy Jacques cried, "What? So fine a skin.

[00:10:06]I would like it for the wall of my room.

[00:10:08]Those who have seen the wolf say its pelt is like silver shaded into gray."

[00:10:12]Jacques!

[00:10:13]Etienne Delacroix's anger flooded his face with a great surge of red and bulging veins and Pierre and Francois were stricken with awe at the sight of their father's wrath.

[00:10:23]If you do not burn this beast as I say immediately after slaying it, I will forget you are my son and almost a man.

[00:10:31]I will His own temper choked him into incoherency.

[00:10:36]I I I crave your pardon, father, begged Jacques humbled and alarmed. I forgot myself.

[00:10:42]We will obey, papa, as always, said Francois meekly and Pierre gravely nodded.

[00:10:49]The moon will soon be up, said Monsieur Delacroix after a short silence. The room had grown dark while they talked receiving a wordless signal from his father. Pierre struck a match and lit the blackened lamp on the desk.

[00:11:02]With a startling transition as light leaped forth to dispel the murky shadows of the room, Pierre came near to exclaiming aloud at the sight of the haggard lines in his father's face. For the first time in his life he realized that what his parent had said earlier in the evening about aging was not spoken jokingly nor the repeated jest Monsieur Delacroix had always allowed himself but the truth. His father was old.

[00:11:30]"You had better go," said Etienne Delacroix as his keen eyes caught the fleeting expression on his son's face.

[00:11:37]His fingers drummed a muffled tattoo upon the fine edge of his desk, the only sign of his nervous condition that he could not entirely control. "Monsieur de Maire's opinion is that the wolf is stronger when the moon is full, but it is mine that tonight it will be easier to discover."

[00:11:53]The three turned to the door, but as they reached the threshold, Monsieur de la Croix beckoned to the eldest. "An instant, Pierre. I speak to you alone."

[00:12:03]The young man closed the door at his brother's backs and returned to the desk, his steady eyes directed at his father. Monsieur de la Croix for the moment seemed to have forgotten what he intended to say. His head was bowed on his chest and the long locks of his ashen hair had fallen forward over his brow.

[00:12:19]Suddenly, he sat erect as if it took an immense effort of his will to perform the simple action, and again, Pierre was startled to perceive the emotions which twisted his father's features.

[00:12:30]It was the first time he had ever seen tenderness there, or beheld love in the eyes he had sometimes in secret thought a little cruel.

[00:12:39]"Have you a pocket crucifix, my son?"

[00:12:41]"In my room."

[00:12:42]"Take it with you tonight, and will you stay close to Jacques? Will you not?"

[00:12:48]His voice was hoarse with unaccustomed anxiety. "He's young, confident, and careless.

[00:12:54]I would not wish to endanger your good mother's last child."

[00:12:58]Pierre was amazed. It had been 15 years since he had last heard his father mention his mother. "You've been a good son, Pierre. Obey me now. Do not let three of you separate, for I hear this beast is a savage one and unafraid even of armed men. Take care of yourself and see to your brothers." "Will you remain in the chateau for safety, papa? You are not armed."

[00:13:19]"I am armed by my faith in the good God and the walls of the Chateau d'Aray.

[00:13:24]When you've lit the fire under the wolf's body, I will be here.

[00:13:28]He lowered the leonine head once more, and Pierre, not without another curious look, departed.

[00:13:35]For a long while, Monsieur Delacroix sat immobile, his elbows resting on the padded arms of the chair, the palms of his hands pressing into his cheeks. Then he abruptly arose, and approaching the open casement, drew the curtains wide.

[00:13:48]Outside, the long rolling slopes fell away toward a dim horizon already blanketed by the dragons of night, whose tiny flickering eyes were winking into view one by one in the dark void above.

[00:14:02]Hurrying cloudlets scurried in little groups across the sky. Lamps were being lit in the jumble of cottages that were the abodes of Monsieur Delacroix's workmen, but at the moment, the sky was illuminated better than the earth, for the gathering darkness seemed to cling, like an animate thing, to the fields and meadows, and stretch ebony claws across the ribbon of the roadway.

[00:14:23]It was time for the moon to rise.

[00:14:27]Monsieur Delacroix turned away from the casement, and with swift, certain steps, went to the door, opening it.

[00:14:34]The hall was still, but from the direction of the dining room, there came a clatter of dishes as the servants cleared the table. Quickly, with an unusual alacrity for a man of his years, he silently traversed the floor of the huge hall and passed through its outer portals.

[00:14:50]A narrow gravel lane led him along the side of the chateau until he reached the building's extreme corner, where he abandoned it to strike off across the closely clipped sward in the direction of a small clump of beech trees.

[00:15:04]The night was warm and peaceful, with no threat of rain.

[00:15:07]A teasing zephyr tugged at the thick locks on his uncovered head. From somewhere near his feet came the chirp of a cricket.

[00:15:15]In the grove, it was darker until he came to its center.

[00:15:19]Wending through and past the entangled thickets like one who had traveled the same path many times and found the small glade that opened beneath the stars.

[00:15:29]Here there was more light again, but no breeze at all. In the center of the glade was an oblong grassy mound and at one end of it a white stone and on the stone the name of his wife.

[00:15:42]Monsieur Delacroix stood for an instant beside the grave with lowered head and then he sank to his knees and began to pray.

[00:15:51]In the east the sky began to brighten as though some torch-bearing giant drew near walking with great strides beyond the edge of the earth. The stars struggled feebly against the superior illumination, but their strength diminished as a narrow band of encroaching yellow fire appeared on the rim of the world.

[00:16:09]With its arrival the low monotone of prayer was checked to continue afterward with what seemed to be some difficulty.

[00:16:19]Monsieur Delacroix's throat was choked either with grief for the unchangeable past or an indefinable apprehension for the inevitable future.

[00:16:29]His breath came in struggling gasps and tiny beads of perspiration formed on his face and hands. His prayers became mumbled jerky utterances holding no recognizable phrases of speech.

[00:16:42]Whispers and then they ceased altogether.

[00:16:46]A small dark cloud danced across a far-off mountaintop, slid furtively over the border of the land and for a minute erased the yellow gleam from the horizon. Then, as if in terror shaken by its own temerity, it fled frantically into oblivion.

[00:17:04]And the great golden platter of the full moon issued from behind the darkness it had left to deluge the landscape with a ceaseless shower of elusive atoms, tiny notes that danced the pathways of space.

[00:17:19]Monsieur de la Croix gave a low cry like a child in pain.

[00:17:23]His agonized eyes were fixed on the backs of his two hands as he held them pressed against the dew-dampened sword.

[00:17:29]His fingers had begun to stiffen and to curl at their tips. He could see the long coarse hair sprouting from the pores of his flesh as he had many times within the past month since the night he'd fallen asleep by the grave of his wife and slept throughout the night under the baleful beams of the moon.

[00:17:48]He flung back his head whimpering because of the terrible pressure he could feel upon his skull and its shape appeared to alter so that it seemed curiously elongated. His eyes were bloodshot and as they sank into their sockets, his lips began to twitch over the fangs in his mouth.

[00:18:09]The three brothers, crouching nervously in the shadows of the vineyard, started violently. Jacques the younger almost lost his grasp on the gun with the silver bullets which his father had given him.

[00:18:22]From somewhere nearby, there had arisen a great volume of sound, swirling and twisting and climbing to shatter itself into a hundred echoes against the vault of heaven, rushing and dipping and sinking into the cores of all living hearts and the very souls of men.

[00:18:42]>> [clears throat] >> The haunting cry of the werewolf.

[00:18:49]>> [music] >> Well, I would just like to encourage you to go over to Patreon now and um join my Patreon to get all these stories ad-free.

[00:19:02]So, that was the Werewolf Howls by Clifford Ball, published in 1941 in Weird Tales.

[00:19:09]Let me say something about Clifford Ball first of all, born in 1908 in Manhattan, New York City, son of Howard Hamilton Ball and Emma Vaughn, Ball born as Nankivel.

[00:19:21]Good Cornish name.

[00:19:22]His parents marriage was brief and unhappy and by 1910 young Clifford was living with his maternal grandparents in Millers Town, Perry County, Pennsylvania. A small town he would return to throughout his life. His mother went back to New York where she retrained as a nurse and eventually remarried and he was left Clifford was left in Millers Town and then raised by his two maiden aunts, Jenny and Lillian Nankivel.

[00:19:46]Circumstance he shared as it happened with H.P. Lovecraft who was likewise raised by maiden aunts in the absence of a father. So Clifford went to the local high school in Millers Town. He struggled with mathematics and developed an attachment to a young and attractive school teacher that he would recall in print years later apparently without embarrassment.

[00:20:04]It was during this period that he discovered Weird Tales magazine which he began reading in 1925 and never really stopped. So it was Weird Tales interestingly was the formative literary influence on him.

[00:20:15]So after he graduated from high school he took a job at the license bureau of the state highway department, came to detest it and left. He wondered relentlessly. I mean this is a big thing in the 1920s in the states wasn't it? I think of Jack Kerouac and all of that lot and the the bums and riding the rails all that very romantic stuff.

[00:20:35]And he he expected to find good wages in the reconstruction effort and he found a broke state and a frightened tourist industry when he went down to um Miami. So [clears throat] that he went down to Miami after the hurricane in '26.

[00:20:50]And he worked as a hash slinger, a fry cook, a ditch digger, auto spring level, a cloth spreader in a shirt factory, caper on dynamite crews, dice table operator in a gambling house and a bartender in a Virginia tavern. He later described these years as the best of his life.

[00:21:07]Sounds a lot of fun. By the mid-1930s he was living in Astoria, Queens, in New York City with his mother and stepfather. He married a woman named Hermine Mall in 1933, but it was a brief marriage ended in divorce. He completed a single year of college at some unspecified point.

[00:21:24]He was in the 1930s a man in his late 20s with a colorful biography, no settled profession, and a decade's worth of accumulated reading in Weird Tales.

[00:21:33]So, Robert E. Howard, who committed suicide in 1936, this event was in some way responsible for pushing Clifford Ball from being a reader to a writer.

[00:21:43]Howard was his hero. In a fan letter published in the magazine in January '37, Ball mourned him, uh, "A hundred international Tarzans could never erase the memory of Conan the Cimmerian." I can never say second Cimmerian. Conan the Cimmerian. He was just a barbarian. Let's call him the barbarian Cimmerian. Uh, Ball had watched the magazine since '25 and he saw uh, progress steadily upwards to the zenith. And when Red Nails was announced as the last Conan story, he felt as if some sort of income or expected resource had been suddenly, uh, severed.

[00:22:17]So, then he began to write himself beginning with Dua the Accursed, 1937.

[00:22:22]And these first three stories he put in were your bog standard sword and sorcery tales, barbarian warriors, warring kingdoms, and the general landscape of Howard's Hyborian Age translated into the Ball's somewhat more ornate idiom.

[00:22:35]Important point. So, I think that's really funny because I kind of came onto that in the '70s reading, uh, Fritz Leiber, reading Michael Moorcock, reading the sword sword and sorcery stuff, Poul Anderson, all that kind of stuff. Um, that was my intro some decades after him, but the tail end of the same movement.

[00:22:54]So, he then, the next three stories he, um, writes for Weird Tales are, um, The Swine of Aaea draws on the Cersei legend. The little man is more conventional horror and the werewolf howls is a story here.

[00:23:09]Um when it appeared in print, he'd already enlisted in the US Army Air Corps, signed up in Baltimore 1941, 10 months before the story's publication. His draft card from October 4th, 1940 describes him as 5 ft 10 135 lb with blue eyes, brown hair, dark complexion, and a scar on his lower lip.

[00:23:28]He's a slim guy, really. He served over 4 years including 18 months in Europe with the 8th Air Force, the great strategic bombing force that flew out of England over occupied Europe. His prior experience working on dynamite crews presumably made the bomb disposal specialty.

[00:23:45]Um Well, bomb disposal I bombing. His grave marker reads AAF 788 bomb squad, US Army. So so it looks like he did become bomb disposal. During his service, he married a wedding Jean E. Stewart in Boise Boise, Idaho in '43. He was discharged September '46 settling settling Baltimore, worked as an employee of Butler Brothers, a wholesale house.

[00:24:13]Whether he intended to resume writing is not known. He hadn't written anything for 5 years.

[00:24:18]And then in on 11th of January, 1947, he was accidentally drowned in Baltimore.

[00:24:23]He's 38. He was buried at Millers Town Millers Town Riverview Cemetery in Perry County near his grandparents and aunts, the people who'd raised him. His entire published fiction was six stories, all for Weird Tales within 4 years.

[00:24:38]Um and they were all published together in the a book called The Thief of Fourth and other stories. So that was it.

[00:24:46]What did I think of the story?

[00:24:48]Well, I liked the story.

[00:24:51]I thought it was neat well-crafted piece with a structural twist. I mean, I didn't see that it was going to be the dad, you know. Um but when you get it, if caught you go, "Well, of course it was." And that I think that's the great um the great virtue of this story is that this this twist seems inevitable once you get it, but I certainly didn't get it until I got it. Now, I got it when he's when the sons went out and he given them a silver bullets. And so, I guess the story is the two things that are implicit in the story, which he doesn't bring out, which I think is actually a real the the the mark of a good writer, not spoon-feeding the audience. Um I I could nearly say something really controversial, and I'm going to say it.

[00:25:30]I've just finished reading The Great Wen by Alan Moore, who I admire. And there's an awful lot of spoon-feeding in there.

[00:25:36]He's explaining his plot, um which I don't think is a great thing to do. And um you got to trust your reader, and he trusts you. He doesn't explain it.

[00:25:46]So, implicitly, he's made those silver bullets to kill himself. Hasn't he?

[00:25:51]That's why he's done them. He won't doesn't want them to believe in the werewolf. He wants to kind of put the whole thing to bed in the in the neatest possible way, and have the thing burned.

[00:26:01]He won't brook any And this is all implicit. What at the end you realize what all these comments are about. You realize what he was actually about, but you didn't know until until the point, you know. He wants His son wants the um fur coat, and you know, the fur.

[00:26:14]"No, you can't have that. It must be done this way. Everybody must be locked up." He's not even telling the truth. He knows the truth, and he pooh-poohs it, but he still wants all the locals put away. So, he actually turns out for bit You think he's a swine as as you go through it, and then you realize what a compassionate man he was, self-sacrificing.

[00:26:31]That's So, I think that's really good.

[00:26:33]The second thing is that I thought was interesting was the mechanism of the werewolf, how he became a werewolf.

[00:26:40]And it seems to me, from what I read, that he was grieving his late wife, again who he hadn't spoken about, but clearly very much loved. So, So it's a great presentation, really. We're presented with this brute of a man, and he turns by the end to being a pretty nice guy, a self-sacrificing, caring father, and a grieving husband, you know, a grieving widower. And so I think that's that is the sign of literary sophistication. So I think in terms of the structure and the way he doesn't spoon-feed and the way we get things at the end we go, "Oh, yeah." And he and he kind of upends our expectations or our beliefs about the Mr. Duda Delacroix.

[00:27:25]Um now, one thing that I didn't [clears throat] which I I mean, yeah, is the way they write the vocabulary is ambitious in the way of someone who's read wildly widely and want [clears throat] or wildly and wants to read it to know.

[00:27:41]So ebony claws across the ribbon of the roadway. I'm surprised it wasn't ebony.

[00:27:45]If he'd been an HP Lovecraft guy, it would have been ebony.

[00:27:48]Um and you get this in all I've got to say this when I read pulp fiction.

[00:27:54]Whether it's Robert E. Howard, whether it's Clark Ashton Smith, whether it's um Lovecraft, [clears throat] whether it's Clifford Ball here, there is a lot of merit to a lot of the things they do.

[00:28:04]But one thing that gets me is the overblown ornate vocabulary that somebody actually commented it's like Clark Ashton Smith swallowed a thesaurus. And Lovecraft's the same, and Howard's the same, and it's it's really interesting because most of these guys didn't have formal educations, you know, in that they didn't go through the Ivy League or whatever.

[00:28:26]Uh and they weren't of that elevated social class that you get like Edith Wharton and Henry James who and >> [clears throat] >> Faulkner I've got to I'm not totally up on Faulkner's biography, actually. I should know it, but it's a big blank.

[00:28:40]But you know, these were James and Wharton certainly were formally educated people, and it shows.

[00:28:46]They don't have to show off their erudition. It's just there.

[00:28:51]Whereas I think these guys now the very interesting thing is if you look at the British penny dreadfuls of Victorian mid-century stuff in the 19th century, 100 years before this, they do the same thing. So Vani and all of that lot that they they are not educated they are not formally educated reader writers rather, but they use the big words almost like to impress the readers. Anyway, a minor um hard to read cuz the sentences are long. A minor thing. I want to kind of say something now at probably more length. So if you don't want more length stop.

[00:29:26]I'll do a little pause so I can see the break in the waveform. I'm going to I'm just have a sip of coffee while Wow, that was strong coffee.

[00:29:38]Right, history of the werewolf story. So the werewolf story exists before literature. That is to say it does not begin as a written form. It doesn't begin in books. It begins in folklore and the stories that rural people in Europe would tell around the fire in their villages.

[00:30:01]So the man who becomes a wolf is part of the oral tradition. Goes really back a long way. The Greek author Herodotus records the Neuri of Scythia that the Neuri of Scythia transformed into wolves once a year. Ovid, the Latin writer, gives us Lycaon the Arcadian king who Jupiter punishes for cannibalism by locking him permanently in wolf form, which is the first literary wolf in the Western canon.

[00:30:27]And already encodes the myth's central logic. The beast is in the man before the transformation begins. The transformation merely makes visible what was already there. So I'm going to spoon-feed you now.

[00:30:37]So what what that's saying is in the werewolf story very often the man is a beast and is rewarded by being made into an actual beast. So, his outer And this is right through to Angela Carter, really, in in the 1990s.

[00:30:52]Um The man is a beast, and it's the transformation into a wolf. Company wolves, think about that, particularly the um what's his name, Jordan film uh in the '80s.

[00:31:04]Okay. When you come to the werewolves, and I'm going to say why this is in a minute, but when you come to the werewolf stories, you expect a canon of stories like the vampire story.

[00:31:16]We imagine the vampire and the werewolf are equivalent monsters.

[00:31:21]But what we've got is they both emerge from folklore, but the vampire is much more work. We have Polidori, the vampire, then we have the French. We've done loads of them, the French vampire stories, um Clarimonde and things like that.

[00:31:34]We've got Sheridan Le Fanu, Irish writer, doing Carmilla.

[00:31:38]Um we've got and we have Varney the Vampire in the Penny Dreadfuls. And then in the 1890s, we have Dracula, which was so dominant that it it made the rules for the vampire. So, we all know the rules for the vampire. They were added as time went on, actually, not just Stoker, but um different rules were added. We know them. The werewolf is much more dispersed, more varied. There never was a Dracula for the werewolf, if you know what I mean. There never was that one defining text that set the rules. No writer of them managed to do that. Um and so, it is um a weaker monster, if you like. Who's going to win in a fight, a vampire or a werewolf? You'll have thought this many times, I certainly have. Uh probably I've battled it out with figurines at one point. But um But there we are. Anyway, let's think about So, we go back to this idea.

[00:32:31]People believed in werewolves, that a man could become a wolf, or a woman, but mainly a man, but always. Um More coffee, sorry.

[00:32:40]I'm addicted. It's strong, but I'm loving it. Um so, in the medieval period, they know about the the classical werewolves, and they know about the folk tales in Europe, uh and the church faced this werewolf transformation as a genuine theological problem with lycanthropy. If transformation were real, it implied powers that only God should possess. If it was illusory, it was the work of the devil deceiving weak minds. So, canon law eventually settles that it's an illusion, but the popular imagination was less tidy, and the folklore of rural Europe continued to treat the werewolf as a literal and present danger. In France, werewolves are big in France, Germany, and the Baltic states. There were werewolf trials from the 15th century into the 17th, producing confessions and executions with the same institutional machinery that prosecuted witches. So, Gilles Garnier was burned at Dole in 1573. Peter Stumpp was executed at Cologne in 1589 after confessing to decades of murders in wolf form. So, this wasn't a metaphor. This guy was treated as if it were true that he became a wolf and killed people as a wolf.

[00:33:46]So, how does the um the mechanism of how a person becomes a werewolf varies. So, the wolf skin or wolf belt was the oldest and most widespread mechanism across Germanic, Slavic, and Scandinavian traditions.

[00:34:01]Putting on the skin of a wolf or passing through a loop of belt made of wolf hide was understood to be sufficient. And some of the berserks or the um the the Viking warriors were kind of wolfy and wore wolf pelts to to get the strength. This is a very ancient shamanic idea. You borrow the strength of a particular animal. Um so, >> [clears throat] >> so Peter Stumpp, the guy who said he was a werewolf, he said he'd received a magical girdle from the devil that enabled his transformations. And when he took this girdle or belt off, he became a human again. So, the physical object as a seat of the power of becoming a wolf appears again and again. It's not that the skin that merely changes the body, but it changes the mind. That wearing the wolf is enough to become it. This is a shamanic idea. And this is the mechanism that Sutherland Menzies uses in the 1838 story Hughes the Werwolf, uh one of the most entertaining werewolf fictions in English and one of the least read. I'm hoping to do that at one point.

[00:35:01]Um there's a guy called Hughes Wolferic, a young Norman outcast in medieval Kent, condemned by his neighbors as a hereditary werewolf on nothing more than his family name. Anyway, we won't do any spoilers, but there's a wolf skin involved. Another way of becoming a werewolf was being rubbed being rubbed with a magical salve.

[00:35:21]And this links the werewolf tradition to the broader world of early modern witchcraft, where flying ointments and transformation unguents appear regularly in trial testimony. Drinking from the footprint of a wolf, so there's a wolf footprint got rainwater in it, you drink, or from certain enchanted streams appears in multiple tradition. The Livonian werewolves described by Olaus Magnus were initiated by draining a cup of specially prepared beer while reciting a formula, a communal ritual with shamanistic overtones. We talked about that. Hereditary and birth circumstance may be another way of becoming a werewolf. A child born on Christmas Eve or on a particular feast day or to parents who had made certain bargains might carry the condition as an inherited trait. In some Southern Slavic traditions, the werewolf in human form could be identified by small physical signs, excessive body hair, a particular set of the eyebrows, fingers of unusual length. The condition was written into the body before it manifested.

[00:36:19]Divine or diabolical punishment is the version most familiar from classical sources. So, the other way to become a werewolf is you're punished to become one, you're cursed with it. Um if you eat human flesh, you become the the beast that eats human flesh. The church adopted this framework and the and it its understanding of lycanthropy was as if it was real, it was a diabolical illusion.

[00:36:39]And the confessions extracted extracted at werewolf trials tended to follow this model of diabolical curse.

[00:36:46]And what is absent from this folk tradition is the full moon as the unavoidable trigger of transformation.

[00:36:52]The association between moonlight and the uncanny is old and widespread, but the full moon is the specific and defining mechanism of werewolf transformation only appears in the scattered sources and never as the dominant convention. So, Sabine Baring-Gould rather in his 1865 book Book of Werewolves says what it does, you know, on the tin.

[00:37:14]They are. It's a book of werewolves.

[00:37:16]What are you What else do you want?

[00:37:17]Sides reports from southern France as I said, the the werewolf is very big in France.

[00:37:23]Particularly in Brittany, um, which is arguably not France. Uh, this just caused some kind of confusion there. The people have thrown their coffee. Sacre bleu! Or I'm getting benedictions in Breton. Um, so so yeah, werewolves transformed um, can have all I'm trying to think of a Breton. But this is one element on among many. The full moon as a rule is a 20th century idea.

[00:37:48]And we'll come back to that.

[00:37:50]So, the transmission by bite is another non-folk it's to with the werewolves.

[00:37:57]Uh, and it's so thoroughly established it now seems ancient, but it's not really there in the um, folk stuff. It appears to derive from confusion with vampire transmission uh, transmission and entered the werewolf story through cinema rather than through folklore. The wolf skin, the salved curse, the bargain with the devil, the accident of birth, these are the traditional mechanisms. The bite and the moonlight are surprisingly modern.

[00:38:24]In Slavic folklore Well, as we say, when we when you read Stoker Le Fanu, it's obvious that a werewolf isn't a vampire. And we've seen the movies, haven't we? We've seen the Hammer horror. We've seen Abbott and Costello. So, we know they're not the same. So, but if you go back into the Serbian or Bulgarian roots, the figures have the deepest roots there. They're not reliably distinguishable.

[00:38:49]The vukodlak, the world the word means literally wolf fur or wolf hide, could designate what Western folklore would identify as a werewolf or what it would identify as a vampire, depending on context and region. What the West eventually separated into two distinct monster types in the original tradition were aspects of a single phenomenon. The creature that crosses the boundary between the living and the dead, that wears an animal skin as a tool of power or curse, that preys on those it once loved, these have similar roots.

[00:39:19]Sabine Baring-Gould noted that the Serbs connected vampire and werewolf and called them by one, vukoslak. So, forgive my pronunciation. The Serbian wolf god, Vuk, was the supreme deity of the Southern Slav pantheon. And the wolf was a primary animal totem of these peoples.

[00:39:39]The word vampire may itself be a secondary term, a circumlocution for the unmentionable sacred name of the werewolf. Now, there's an interesting thing in Irish, one of the words for wolf is mac tíre, son of the land, because you can't say the original. You have to use a a totem word. Another one is in Welsh, we have the the hare, ysgyfarnog means the eared one, the big eared one, because these totem animals can't be named by their proper name. So, the the vukodlak couldn't be called that, so they used the word vampire instead for the werewolf. So, the vurdalak of Russian tradition and the word enters Russian through Pushkin's 1836 poem, which borrowed and adapted it from Byron's The Giaour, itself a corruption of the Greek vrykolakas, which derives from the Slavic vukodlak.

[00:40:31]Hope you're with me there. So, Slavic to Greek, Greek to Russian.

[00:40:37]Uh is understood as a former which werewolf or excommunicated sinner returned from the dead. So, in Alexei Tolstoy's 1839 novella, The Family of the Vourdalak, which we've done, it describes creatures that we would identify as vampires, but the title explicitly uses this word a werewolf derived word. So, the distinction had not yet solidified in much of the Slavic world it never did. So, what the Slavic tradition preserves and what the Western literature tradition partially lost when it separated vampire from werewolf and gave each a cleanish set of rules is the sense that these creatures share a common origin in the same anxieties about the dead who do not stay, about the animal inside the civilized person, about the boundary between the village and the forest that is always more permeable than daylight makes it seem.

[00:41:23]So, we have Gilbert Campbell's The White Wolf of Kostopchin, set in rural Russia, which we will do, draws on this ambiguous tradition without quite resolving it. The white wolf that terrorizes the countryside carries the moral weight of a cursed being.

[00:41:38]Um so, then there's a literary tradition. So, we we jump to France and we're going to jump back in a bit to the 12th century of Marie de France.

[00:41:47]Marie de France who did a whole series of lais, which is a a word meaning epic poems, I suppose. And there's one called the Bisclavret or Bisclavret if it is Breton. It's just a Breton story.

[00:41:59]Um and it's the literary invention of considerable sophistication. She herself is not interested in the wolf as a monster or as a theological problem. Her knight is a good man with a secret and the horror of the story is not the transformation, but the betrayal that traps him. It draws on Breton oral tradition, as she says.

[00:42:18]So, the Brittany is is has this thing about the werewolf, you know, as the Slavs do. And so, France and the Slavs really love the wolf. And then we have the Scandinavian Baltic werewolves as well.

[00:42:34]So, word werewolf, where is the standard Anglo-Saxon word for a man. And wolf is a standard Anglo-Saxon word for a wolf.

[00:42:45]So, where And this is this in in Latin it's weir, in Norse Old Norse var, in Gothic wer, in Welsh you have gour, Breton gour. And they're all from the the common Indo-European word for a man.

[00:43:01]Wolf comes down as well, but okay okay there it's a it's a taboo word amongst the Celts, cuz the word for wolf in Welsh is blaidd. So, it is not the Indo-European root. It's probably that that one was too You couldn't say it. So, there were circumlocutions.

[00:43:17]So, um what we've got between Marie de France and the Victorian period, the werewolf appeared fitfully in European literature. Frederick Marryat's The White Wolf of the Hearts of Mountains in his 1839 novel The Phantom Ship is one of the more effective early treatments in English. And then we have the Erckmann-Chatrian novella The Man Wolf, a French story, which I've done just recently. 1876 brings medical rationalism to bear on the problem and finds it inadequate.

[00:43:43]So, the early 19th century, however, was more interested in ghosts and Gothic architecture than in werewolves. And then we have the origin on the origin of the species, Darwin 1859, The Descent of Man 1871, which introduces to the Western world this idea that we are beasts, that we that the the beasts and humans are not two separate streams of creation utterly apart forever, but that humans came from beasts. And this, of course, um This is really interesting idea that within us all is a beast. Um and then we have something like we have um 1886, we have Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, who transforms not into a wolf, but into a very hairy, unpleasant beast who is definitely an echo of the werewolf. And then we have Clemence Housman's The Werewolf, 1890.

[00:44:37]Not pulp fiction, something closer to saga in the clo- cold Norse landscape.

[00:44:41]We've got um Walpole's Tarn Helm, which has a Scandinavian setting in my own Cumberland, but um um Scandinavian, so the wolf warrior berserkers of Norse tradition, the Ulfhednar.

[00:44:55]Um I'm still doing my Icelandic and loving it, even though it's hard.

[00:45:00]Oh, that's all very well, but the werewolf we have and love is an American, I would say, creation.

[00:45:08]So, it begins in these pulp magazines we've already talked about. Begins 1920s, 1930s. We have Lovecraft, Howard, Ashton Smith, et cetera. We've all talked about how they overwrite.

[00:45:21]And then we have this story, The Wolf House, in that canon, 1941.

[00:45:26]It's a proper werewolf. It's got the It's got the moonlight. It's got the um It's got the silver bullets. It's got a lot of the the the tropes, the stock tropes of the werewolf story. In this case, of course, he is the sinner. He's not hasn't been bitten.

[00:45:45]He's been made no diabolical bargain.

[00:45:47]He's never been um rubbed down with a magic salve by a witch in a um anyway, never mind. Uh so, any All he did was fall asleep grieving at his wife's grave, and the moonlight did the rest, an accident of love.

[00:46:03]Um so The Wolf Man the movie was released in the same month that Ball's story appeared in November '41.

[00:46:13]The film and the story share a cultural moment. Where Ball's story gave the werewolf an unusual and specifically emotional mechanism, the film was in the business of codifying and simplifying.

[00:46:24]Curt Siodmak, its screenwriter, again forgive my pronunciation, was a German Jewish refugee who'd fled the Nazis and brought to Hollywood a European refugee's understanding of what it meant to be pursued, transformed, unable to control what you're becoming. What he wrote, however, was designed for mass consumption. The transformation triggered by the full moon, the curse passed on by bite, the silver blade as the only effective weapon. The famous rhyme that sounds like an ancient legend that was composed by Siodmak himself.

[00:46:51]None of these were established werewolf convention before 1941. So in a sense, I talked about the vampire story being uh given its The vampires given its rules by Dracula, by the novel Dracula. The The werewolf had to wait um till 1941 as a movie to be given its rules. Then now we know what a werewolf is, you know.

[00:47:14]And they they it's basically uh kicked out the the folk the lot of the folks that was gone now.

[00:47:22]Okay. So the Universal Studios had been assembling their monster franchise for a decade before. So then then The Wolf Man completed it. They already had Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, The Mummy in 1932, and now the werewolf given a tragic face in Lon Chaney Jr.'s own heavily prematurely worn features communicated suffering without apparent effort. Of course the the other monster that comes in with this lot. So we have the the werewolf the vampire, Frankenstein's monster, the mummy, and of course the zombie. And they are the pantheon, if you like, of the classic monsters.

[00:48:00]The ghost, yeah, off to the side.

[00:48:04]Um anyway, and then we look So, we have that in the '40s, and then there's a bit of a comeback in uh the modern reckoning, which is Guy N. Smith, the English writer, produces this book called The Wolf by Moonlight, 1974, and it's becoming the uh the body horror, the slasher horror of the 1980s, so it's developing into that. Um it's it's it that's what it is.

[00:48:25]And then we get Angela Carter in the '70s. She does her book called The Bloody Chamber, 1979. Three werewolf stories: The Werewolf, The Company of Wolves, and Wolf Alice. Good band, Wolf Alice.

[00:48:37]And they represent the most significant literary engagement with the myth since Houseman, approached from a completely different direction. Remember, he did the Norse saga type thing.

[00:48:45]Um Carter's werewolves were not monsters to be hunted, they are figures through which she examines the violence latent in fairy tale, gender relations, and the whole apparatus of civilized and strength that the wolf in her work stands against. Her prose is the opposite of the pulp tradition, dense, allusive, conscious of its own literary inheritance, reaching deliberately towards the lush excess of the fairy tale. Um where pulp writers accumulated vocabulary and press, Carter accumulated it to signify. That's a posh way of saying I'm going to speak sound like a real snob now. Uh the pulp writers, they used these big words, and they just dropped them in in spectacle. You're like, "Oof." Just like finding um glitter in mud.

[00:49:27]Carter, her prose is luminous.

[00:49:31]There we are.

[00:49:32]>> [gasps] >> In The Company of Wolves, which Neil Jordan adapted for film in 19 1984 with Carter's co-authorship in the screenplay, is built around the insight that the wolf and the girl are not simply predator and prey. The girl who does not fear the wolf, who burns her grandmother's bones and laughs, who goes to sleep in the wolf's embrace. Carter's girl rewrites the myth by refusing the victim's role in the myth assigns her.

[00:49:53]It's a feminist intervention in a tradition that had from Bisclavret onwards defined its horror largely through what the werewolf did to women and it changed the terms of the literary werewolf permanently.

[00:50:04]Since Carter, the serious literary werewolf has had to reckon with what she said. So Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf 2011 puts the monster's interiority at the center. Stephen Graham Jones' Mongrels 2016 uses lycanthropy as a lens for race, poverty, and the experience of the American margins. But they are inconceivable without Carter. Uh and then there are other things like um that song Werewolves of London and American Werewolf in London, the movie, great movie. And what was that Dog Soldiers?

[00:50:32]That was a great pulp thing about soldiers fighting werewolves. They were very um I thought American Werewolf in London was really clever and uh witty. Um I think Dog Soldiers is is >> [laughter] >> a len- I did a DVD of that and I lent it to uh my then girlfriend's um daughter who said [laughter] who didn't like it. She said, "It's just chavs fighting werewolves." So chavs is a very unpleasant slang word for um low-class people who are a bit thuggish.

[00:51:04]Um so there we are. So that that is the the werewolf story. I I think it's really interesting. I think somebody I mean Carter's done the werewolf story.

[00:51:12]Somebody needs to go back and write a modern werewolf story >> [snorts] >> that is as good as Dracula. Um that isn't, you know, isn't isn't necessarily overly literary. It's just a a ripping yarn, no haha, no pun intended. Anyway, there we are. Um I'm on a I'm on a werewolf run. I will see how many more we do. Those of you who hate the classic monsters, I know some people love vampire stories for example and other people are uh put off by them.

[00:51:42]Same will be true of uh werewolves. You think you know everything about the werewolf and the vampire, but you don't.

[00:51:49]Haha. Anyway, okay. Hope you like that.

[00:51:52]Cheers for now.

[00:51:57]>> [music] >> Everybody dies, don't they?

[00:52:04]Everybody comes back, don't they?

[00:52:06]Isn't that so?

[00:52:08]>> You tried to get into the locked room today, didn't you?

[00:52:11]>> How do you know that they'd come back, mother?

[00:52:14]What's the secret?