The Werewolf of Paris [Paperback]

This is my all-time favorite novel. I've read it so many times, I've lost track. When I first read it, I couldn't believe it wasn't a nineteenth century French novel, and that author Guy Endore was a twentieth century American.

Werewolf is the odyssey of born pariah Bertrand Caillet, a werewolf in spite of himself. Every life he touches suffers, whether he means it to or not. He rifles graves for sustenance during his lycanthropic episodes, and conceals his identity by becoming a French soldier during the Franco-Prussian War and the Communard uprising. He even finds the one woman whose love might save him, an equally bizarre but oddly touching Jewish outcast named Sophie with decidedly S&M tastes.

The novel is many things, not the least of which is episodic. It's a love story, a war story, a tragedy, and an absurdist comedy, by turns. It's grotesquely funny, and hilariously terrifying. Most of all, it's a mature social satire, and just an incredibly damn good read.

Crime of crimes, this magnificent literary masterpiece has once again fallen out of print. Seek it out in the used book bins, until some publisher manages to rediscover it and put it back on the shelves of your local bookstore.

I suppose that I owe a debt of gratitude to writer Marvin Kaye, who selected Guy Endore's classic novel of lycanthropy, "The Werewolf of Paris," for inclusion in Newman & Jones' excellent overview volume "Horror: 100 Best Books." If it hadn't been for Kaye's article on this masterful tale, who knows if I would have ever run across it, and that would have been a real shame, because this is one very impressive piece of work indeed. In this beautifully written novel from 1933, we learn the history of one Bertrand Caillet, the product of a lecherous priest with a sinister family history raping a French peasant girl in the early 1850s. Caillet is later raised by Aymar Galliez, the nephew of the woman who had hired the peasant girl as a maid, and his notes on Caillet, purportedly found many years later by the author, form the kernel of this tale. It does not take Aymar long to realize that something is decidedly wrong with his young charge; in fact, Caillet is a werewolf, who loves nothing more than leaping out of his bedroom window at night and killing livestock and assorted wayfarers around the countryside. Years later, as a young man, Caillet runs away to Paris, to continue his depredations in a more populous arena, but at a most inauspicious time: right in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War, and right before the incredible violence of the Paris Commune of 1871. But this novel is so much more than a simple tale of horror, although there ARE many grisly scenes. Endore (whose real name was Harry Relis) views his werewolf not as a monster, but rather as a sympathetic victim. Although Bertrand commits some truly horrible acts--killing his best friend, committing incest with his mother, despoiling graves, murdering countless creatures, draining his wealthy Jewish girlfriend (a neurotic, self-destructive, death-obsessed girl who today would probably be a Goth) slowly of her life's blood--the author makes it clear that the atrocities going on around him (e.g., the 20,000 Parisians killed by the Versaillists during the Commune) make his sins seem small indeed. Presciently, the author says that future wars will kill millions, a prediction sadly borne out just a decade after this book's release. Perhaps what is most remarkable about this tale, though, is its seeming veracity. Endore gives us so much information about the Commune, and peoples his novel with so many actual historical figures, that it really is difficult to tell where fact ends and fiction begins. There supposedly really was a Sgt. Bertrand in 1840s Paris who was said to be a grave-despoiling werewolf, and that fact adds an additional frisson to this tale. Thus, "The Werewolf of Paris" works as both an excellent tale of terror AND an easy-to-take lesson in French history. I knew virtually zilch about the Commune before going into this book, but feel that I've learned quite a bit about it now, and in a fun way, too. That's not to say that fans of a good horror tale will be left unsatisfied. As I mentioned, this tale contains its fair share of gore and grue, and some pretty terrible incidents are depicted. The horrible tale of that lecherous priest's ancestor being tortured in an oubliette will not soon be forgotten, the real-life facts of the Commune atrocities are equally quite disturbing, and a discussion of the dietary experiments tried by the desperate Communards (ragout of rat, anyone?) will surely turn the stomachs of most. The pitiful final fate of Bertrand Caillet will surely move most readers, too. Despite an occasional glitch here and there (Bertrand travels northeast to reach Paris from the Yonne River valley, when he should be going northwest; Bertrand is said to have been interred in August 1873 and exhumed in June 1881, after eight years and two months, but that should be seven years and 10 months), this really is a terrific piece of writing from Mr. Endore. Anyway, thanks again, Marvin! I owe you one!

Guy Endore's 'The Werewolf of Paris' is rightly considered a classic of horror and being published in 1933 as one of the first literary treatments of lycanthropy. The story is told from the view of an American scholar studying in Paris who happens upon an old manuscript concerning the court martial of Sergeant Bertrand Caillet at the time of the Paris Commune. The story of Bertand is then recounted, how he was conceived when his mother was raped by a priest and how he was born on Christmas Eve, a bad omen according to local superstition. At first he seems like a normal boy but then he starts to have strange dreams and farm animals start to become mysteriously slaughtered. His adoptive uncle suspect something is amiss with young Bertrand, but keeps the suspicions of the local villagers lulled by locking Bertrand's room at night and feeding him raw meat, which keeps his lycanthropy quiescent. This works for a few years until Bertrand is old enough to travel outside the village for his school exams, where he has an unfortunate tryst with a prostitute and acquires a taste for human blood. When his uncle finds out what has happened Bertrand flees to Paris, where he gets caught up in the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian war.
Bertrand is presented as a likable young man afflicted with a condition beyond his power to control. We also sympathize with his uncle who follows him to Paris, conflicted by his love for his adopted son and guilt over the deaths caused by him. Bertrand's crimes are contrasted with the horrors of the Paris Commune and the even greater horrors of the reprisals by the Versailles government. The book meanders somewhat but is still a very good story and a classic of the genre.