Frostbite is Chilling Twist on Werewolf Genre
Author Wellington Gives Us Settings, Characters We Can Bite in to
Oct 29, 2009
Wellington, who has established himself as a writer of popular chillers, takes a straightforward path in Frostbite: A Werewolf Tale with few sub-plots and distractions. He sticks to the main character whose strange journey through life is fraught with cruel and supernatural twists that would drive most of us insane.
But Cheyenne Clark is no ordinary woman. When she was 12, Chey, as she is called in the book, watched as a werewolf attacked and killed her father during a long road trip through the Canadian wilderness.
A Werewolf Ate Her Father
Frostbite starts with the adult Chey lost alone near or in the Arctic and finds herself chased by wolves who are, in turn, scared off by a strange wolf with glowing eyes that chases her up a tree and manages to dig a claw into her foot.
Thus begins her slow descent into a physical schizophrenia. When the moon is out, even a sliver and even during daylight hours (which are weird that far north), she transforms into the very monster she travelled so far to kill with, ahem, a silver bullet. (Can’t quite get rid of all those ancient traditions.)
Frostbite is a true page turner with short, breathless chapters that usually end in cliffhangers and tight, graphic, gritty passages. Chey is challenged on every page to hold her mind and body together and Wellington seems to push her near the brink, perhaps over the brink, so often that, like Chey, it is hard to know what is fact and what is a figment of her imagination.
Who, or what, is Dzo?
The Dzo character is mesmerizing. Chey stumbles on Dzo after escaping the wolves. At first he just seems eccentric or just socially retarded. But as the character develops, it becomes evident that he just wasn’t human. Crazy thing is, he is not a werewolf or shape-changer or vampire. If he’s a ghost, he’s not the usual ecto-phantasm we’re all used to. He likes and helps the werewolves and appears and disappears without warning. Yet he drives an old, beat-up pickup and speaks in riddles.
Frozen Forest
Wellington’s description of the "tilted" forest keeps the reader feeling physically cold and emotionally imbalanced. While the town the characters wind up in seems like a deserted nuclear-blast site.
Publicists called Frostbite the first in a series of werewolf books and Dzo would be a great character to include.
This is Wellington’s first foray into the werewolf genre but he wrote four modernized and numerically anchored vampire titles--23 Hours, Vampire Zero, 99 Coffins and 13 Bullets. He also wrote the Monster Island trilogy.
All in time for the fall harvest when we just love to scare ourselves. This was a guilty pleasure--a real page turner with strong charcters, sharp dialogue and efficient chase narratives.
Author David Wellington
Three Rivers Press
Released Oct. 6, 2009
$14.00
277 pages, paperback
ISBN 978-0-307-46083-7
(According to Three Rivers Press, Wellington is the author of the Laura Caxton vampire series (13 Bullets, 99 Coffins, Vapire Zero) and the Monster Island trilogy (Monster Island, Monster Nation, and Monster Planet). He lives in New York City with his wife, Elisabeth. He maintains his popular website at www.davidwellington.net.)
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