Will I love The Wolf's Hour?

Werewolf James Bond killing Nazis in World War II. I’ll say it again: Werewolf James Bond killing Nazis in World War II. What more do you need to know?

Robert R. McCammon’s 1989 horror-adventure imagines the classic Gothic monster of the werewolf as a spy traversing a crumbling Nazi-occupied Europe. The book has an incredible sense of scale and incorporates both stomach-churning body horror and blistering action sequences, including a set piece on a train filled with deadly Saw-style traps and a shootout inside a Parisian opera house.

The Wolf’s Hour is ridiculous, and I love it for that. I… show more.

Whenever I’m asked to recommend a werewolf novel, I kick myself again for waiting so long to get around to McCammon’s take on the lycanthrope. This book isn’t just my favorite werewolf novel; it’s one of my favorite novels. Holy cow! It’s got everything! If you could fuse James Bond and Indiana Jones together, then turn that into a werewolf with roots in the Russian royalty, you’d have our hero, Michael Gallatin.

McCammon has always kind of lived in the shadow of Stephen King, but honestly, he’s ten times the writer, and his endings don’t suck. This book pulled me… show more.

A werewolf eats nazis. That’s the core idea behind this book, and it’s a solid premise. Who wouldn’t want to read something where nazis get eaten by werewolves?

But then, after we get the initial premise out of the way, we get a great anti-hero protagonist: an orphaned child taken in and raised by a pack of werewolves who really just want to be left alone. The story cuts back and forth between his early life and his life as a reluctant (but efficient) assassin in WWII.

McCammon’s a masterful storyteller and really ties all these threads together into both… show more.