The Howling, Gary Brandner

Warning: Some spoilers and discussion of sexual assault.

We’re in the witching season, and with it comes my pivot to all things horror. Today a review of “A Terrifying Tale of the Occult”… Gary Brandner’s The Howling.

The basics: Published in 1977 by Fawcett Gold Medal. A little about them: Fawcett broke ground with paperback originals at a time when the standard was 1) Hardcover first and 2) Paperbacks later. Fawcett said straight to paperback.

Smart. The Howling probably doesn’t need a collectible hardcover edition. It is the definition of a disposable horror novel.

But I think it’s a little more than that.

The plot is basic: Abandoned town with a bad reputation, high number of strange disappearances, and a werewolf problem. Out of town couple moves in, trouble ensues. The characters are rather wooden, the build slow for such a short (223 page) novel. But I enjoyed it all the same. It’s the equivalent of a good B movie. It works, a solid little horror novel that rates a 3/5, or generously a 3.5/5.

Brandner is an effective writer of atmosphere. The story is quite telegraphed but that hardly matters. He creates a mood and I enjoyed said mood.

The book opens with a graphic sexual assault, so reader beware. This has gotten a lot of flak on review sites. Most declare it gratuitous and unnecessary and almost a DNF non-starter. For example (Goodreads sample):

Karyn endures a horrific assault at the beginning of the story which is described in grossly intimate detail. Worst of all, it's done just for shock value. It doesn't really aid in her character development, it doesn't add much to the overall plot and it just ends up feeling like pointless tastelessness. It's brushed off and dismissed way too easily. 

I agree with the part in bold. I get why it might stop you dead in your tracks.

I disagree with the rest of this paragraph.

Karyn’s terrible assault might be very hinge of the book. I think it is integral to the plot.

During the assault she is bitten on the thigh; werewolf bites transform their victim. Her attacker is not a werewolf, but after her experience Karyn is transformed. The bite is a metaphor for the terrible and deep trauma a sexual assault has on not just its victim, but their relationships. It ruins Karyn’s relationship with her husband. Everything else in the story afterward is its consequence. I get the complaints and the non-starter issues people have, but I think they’re missing something Brandner might have been trying to do. Am I giving him too much credit? Possibly. Brandner does not have a reputation as a sophisticated novelist and isn’t around to defend his choices (he passed in 2013). 

I’m just giving you my opinion. YMMV.

Heavy shit aside, let’s talk about the packaging, the 1970s, and the werewolf genre.

The Howling features an interesting back cover blurb declaring it “in the tradition of ‘Salem’s Lot.” Eh… not really. It’s hard to imagine how a tradition could be launched in two years (‘Salem’s Lot debuted in 1975). Stephen King was a rising force at the time and I suspect Fawcett was trying to catch a piece of the wave.

In fact, I wonder if King’s Cycle of the Werewolf (1983) isn’t in The Howling’s tradition, owing its inspiration to Brandner and the general werewolf craze of the era—not the other way ‘round. There were a lot of werewolf treatments at this time in book and film including Whitley Streiber’s The Wolfen and An American Werewolf in London. Cujo (1981) is another fine werewolf story, the tale of a St. Bernard transforming after a bite from a rabid bat into something monstrous. Not a werewolf per se, but the same principles apply.

The Wolfen and Cujo are far superior to The Howling if you’re asking for my opinion/recommendation. But that doesn’t make the latter worthless. It has a period charm of its own. 

If you like sex in your stories there’s a fair bit of that. In fact the best writing is the sex, in particular when Karyns’ husband Roy gets it on with the wicked and voluptuous Marcia. Brandner’s ordinary, workmanlike prose comes to life here in full Skin-emax, late-night glory:

The shadows of evening moved into the valley and darkened the windows of Marcia’s small apartment, but the people within had no sense of time. For Roy Beatty the universe consisted of the hills and hollows, the knowing hands, and the wet, clinging orifices of the wild black-haired woman.

I love the novel’s intense isolated 1970s vibe. No cell phones, no internet, everyone reading books (remember that?) The haunted town of Drago where the action unfolds is haunted and sinister and utterly insular. No police station, a creaky general store and post office, homes left mysteriously abandoned. As the howling intensifies and her pet dog disappears and the menace increases Karyn finds a sympathetic local schoolteacher who knows the town’s backstory. The two plow through books on werewolves, trying to discover all they can to defeat the supernatural monsters. 

Stuff that really doesn’t happen anymore unless you set your story in the past. Which is probably why I prefer this era of horror.

I’ll probably watch the film now, which at best shares a passing resemblance to the novel but has its moments.

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Silence your inner critic, enter the unknown deeps

I have a critic. He has made it his life work to follow me, hound me wherever I go. When I’m online. In the car as I’m driving. I’m taking a shower and look, he’s there again.

He’s not only persistent and annoying (and kinda creepy), he’s also a master of disguise. 

He assumes the voices of readers of works that I haven’t published, offended by what I’m about to say. And he whispers, don’t say that. 

He is the looming presence of a lecturing conservative father. Keep that bottled up, dude. No one wants to see your dirty laundry.

He is the shrill voice telling me I’m not a talented writer, and never was. What a joke… that post, that book? That sucks dude.

He is the placid voice of the common man, urging me back to the safe middle. Don’t write that. Do another top 5 sword-and-sorcery list—that’s what people want. Play it safe. 

He reminds me I’m not worthy to write about certain topics because they’re too complex, the field too well-sewn. That I’m out of my depth. What could you possibly say about heavy metal that Chuck Klosterman and Ian Christe and Eddie Trunk haven’t already said, and better? Who gives a shit about your story when we've got Bruce Dickinson's?

That critic is me, of course.

I fight the battle with him every day. Sometimes his voice barely rises above a whisper, other times it drowns me with a deafening roar. I push on.

I’m currently reading Moby Dick (yes, I’m a glutton for punishment—but not really. Moby Dick is far more accessible than you think, long diversions into the details of whaling aside). It is worth reading because it’s a book loaded with rich, imaginative writing and profound wisdom applicable to all of mankind.

One chapter relevant to this post is “The Lee Shore.” In it Melville describes the primal urge to turn away from the safety and surety of the shore and embrace the unknown of the treacherous deep. The courage to be at sea when dry land calls.

Here’s a pretty good analysis.

So it is with Bulkington. He arrives home after a long whaling voyage, and immediately signs on with another, back out onto the tempestuous ocean. Not because he loves the sea particularly, but because he must, for some reason, be at sea, there being some intolerable pain that assaults him on the land. 

I have to go to sea, again and again. I don’t know precisely why, other than being on land for too long grows intolerable.

My critic is on my shoulder now, as I type this post. Aren’t you mixing metaphors? Are you just showing off by saying you’re reading Moby Dick?

Hey, merciless critic, fuck you. OK?

Today I’m feeling worthy to be on this shelf. 

The real message of Fahrenheit 451

The firemen are you.

People (myself included, until a recent re-read) often get one of the core messages of Fahrenheit 451 backwards.

People ended books. Not top-down government authority. 

People decided shallow entertainment was preferable to literature that challenges them to think and invokes discomfort. The Firemen who burn books—the splashy and memorable part of Ray Bradbury’s novel—aren’t one-dimensional monsters, they’re just men giving the people what they want. 

Chilling.

What they think they want, anyway. Some resort to sleeping pills to silence the pain of existence. Some hold on to their books and are burned to husks. 

Montag never asks to think if his life—which includes a well-paying job and a wife and all material needs met--makes him happy. Without poetry or color or depth or diversity of thought, it does not. 

Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 as radio dominated and television surged in popularity. He saw and grew fearful for the steady erosion of reading and book culture. In the late 1950s he recounted the following incident:

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451, I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

I can only imagine what Ray would have thought of the age of the smartphone and its endless short form video reels and doomscrolling and Twitter and AI.

We might lose to AI, and if we do people as much as big tech will be at fault. Because we settle for its comfortable babble, “create” with it instead of creating with our own skills and intuition and effort.

Fahrenheit 451 is also a stark warning against censorship in all its forms, including softer forms like “political correctness.” Interesting that Ballantine Books censored some of the “problematic” words from the text in a 1967 edition. Did anyone there read the book, I wonder?

If you’re a right-winger who wants to ban books with sex or depict a gay family in a positive light, you’re the person Ray Bradbury was warning against. If you’re a left-winger who condemns Lovecraft and Howard and Burroughs and labels any author who doesn’t check every diversity checkbox as “problematic,” you’re a person who needs to read this book. And do some rethinking. 

Fahrenheit 451 might be old but it’s still a very sharp book. It can cut. 

Great.

Reject machine culture. Reject TikTok. Read.

Growing Up Metal is available on Amazon

Growing Up Metal: The Story Of A Fan Who (Kind Of) Rocked is now available on Amazon.

Kindle: $5.99

Print: $15.99

I'm psyched! And now, for one naked ask.

Please buy a copy.

You’re a loyal reader of the blog. You’ve loved or at least read (skimmed?) my essays, my posting about sword-and-sorcery and heavy metal. Some of you for years.

Thank you.

You know I don’t charge a thing to read anything I’ve written. There’s no annoying pop-up ads, no asks to join my non-existent Patreon, no paywalls, no tip jar. Nothing.

I plan to keep it that way

But I have an ask.

Please buy Growing Up Metal.

If you don’t like heavy metal, you probably know someone who does. Or who likes memoir. Or who grew up in the 80s and 90s. Or struggled to grow up, struggled in his or her marriage. And made it to the other side, with a story that doesn't pull punches.

Read it, review it. Send me feedback. Tell me if you love it, tell me it sucks. Tell me if it moved you, or didn’t.

What is it?

My story from teenager to adult, full and largely unexpurgated. The Truth, the facts of my existence and what I learned from it all, how I listened, and changed. With a fantastic soundtrack.

The story of heavy metal, filtered through me.

The story of a bygone era of time that I tried to bring back to life.

Even a couple dribs and drabs of sword-and-sorcery. Not much, but not zero.

It’s time to tell my story

I’ve been telling stories all of my life. Lots of stories. More than you might think. For some perspective:

• I worked eight years as a full-time reporter for a daily newspaper, writing and publishing stories every day, Monday-Friday.

• I spent 18 years working in healthcare publishing, during which I interviewed hundreds of experts for industry newsletters. And hosted hundreds more on a podcast. I wrote and told all of their stories.

• I spent 25 years covering high school football. In that time I spoke to hundreds of players and coaches, likely thousands. I witnessed great victories, painful defeats, and stood in the pressbox and the stands capturing every detail, sometimes in the driving rain or shivering in brutal cold. And cataloged them all in the pages of a newspaper.

• I’ve told the stories of my grandfathers and their incredible service in two major world wars.

• I’ve told the story of a former colleague who passed away far too early, a keynote speech I delivered to a crowd of more than 1,200.

• I’ve written hundreds of essays, book reviews, and author profiles, here on The Silver Key and for websites like Goodman Games, Black Gate, SFFaudio.com, and The Cimmerian. 

• I wrote a non-fiction book about the lives of sword-and-sorcery authors, telling the weird story of the creation of a niche subgenre of fantasy fiction. A long and interesting story, start to finish, as told in Flame and Crimson.

I learned something from every person I researched or interviewed. Even if it was someone I thought I knew well, my knowledge of them deepened. I’m incredibly grateful to have had this amazing career. No regrets, I loved it all. I would do it all over again.

But something was missing. 

Where was my story in all of this?

Did I even have one worth telling?

For most of my life I’ve considered my story, if it all, as irrelevant, inconsequential. Who was I, next to a star football player, an influential selectman, the chief of police? Next to men and women who wrote influential works of fiction, or fought in wars? Or played in heavy metal bands?

But with the passage of time and (slow) accumulation of wisdom I came to realize a profound truth: That every life is a story. That anyone who has lived a life—even one marked heavily by disappointment and failure—has a story in them, if they are brave enough to speak about it, or set it to paper. That my life, which I formerly had not bothered to examine—and if you had asked me just a few years ago would have said was not worthy of examination—might have something of value. That it was a unique story, and therefore one worth telling. 

For I too lived. Foolishly, tentatively, averagely. But also loudly, passionately, and colorfully, in my own way. In no small part because I grew up listening to the best damned music genre for pale teenage boys our planet has ever seen.

Heavy Metal.

I was part of a unique culture, during a unique period of time that shall never again exist. I was never on the stage, but I was, and remain, a fan, passionately devoted to an utterly unique and misunderstood genre of music. 

I don’t look the part, and never have, but heavy metal resonates in my soul, with the same volume of an amplified arena concert.

The fans’ story is an unwritten chapter in the rich and colorful history of heavy metal. We’ve got Ozzy’s story, and Gene Simmons’, Rob Halford’s, Bruce Dickinson’s, and hundreds more…but what about those who bought their albums, attended their concerts, and followed their exploits on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball? 

Eventually I came to realize this was a story worth telling. It was time to tell the story of a fan … who happened to be me. 

I started with a difficult and subjective question for which I did not have an answer—how much of my story, vs. how much of metal’s? But as I began to draft, and redraft, the decision made itself: it would be my story, with metal as the backdrop. The soundtrack to my life, if you will. 

My story needed to be told, finally, after a lifetime of telling everyone else’s.

Growing Up Metal is not a heavy metal history. If you’re looking for that, look elsewhere. There are many other worthy metal histories written by authors with far greater knowledge of the genre’s depth and breadth than my own. I’ll happily send you my recommendations. 

I think in Growing Up Metal you will find something unprecedented, and unexpected.

Growing Up Metal is the story about how I grew from boy to adult with heavy metal as my constant companion. I tell the story of heavy metal, but heavily filtered through my experiences and perspective. Growing Up Metal is not a sordid tell-all, but it’s intensely personal. Revealing, and raw, and real, which was not easy for someone who spent most his life wearing masks of one sort or another. Who was I, underneath the Gene Simmons face paint? Writing it was incredibly therapeutic, and transformative. Difficult … but also a lot of fun. I did a lot of dumb things, over-the-top, ridiculous things, and lived to tell the tale. 

If you’re going to write a memoir you can’t half-ass it, deflect the spotlight, paint over your faults, tell lies or comforting untruths. Books are a serious business that when told truthfully and at length put their subject under the microscope. 

You can’t hide in a memoir, and if you do, it will suck. No one wants to read a pale copy, sharp edges shorn off and colors muted. 

I didn’t hide writing Growing Up Metal. My life is in its pages.

***

In my younger days I lived a life of consumption. I voraciously consumed music, books, and experiences, at the expense of never looking inside. Today we’re constantly bombarded with external stimulus. The smart phone is if nothing else the greatest distraction machine ever invented. “Doom scrolling” has entered the vernacular. 

Writing Growing Up Metal afforded me a space to stop and reflect. 

The great mythographers Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell said that the real frontier we are called to explore is within. In Growing Up Metal I excavated the events of my past. I reflected on the life I’ve lived, who I was, and who I became, after many trials and false starts and failures.

In the end I was surprised to find it resembled something of The Hero’s Journey, though it did not set out as one.

Heavy metal has an interesting story. It rose, it fell, and was reborn from ruins … a story which strangely parallels my own. All of that is in there. Triumph, failure, crash, and coming to life again. 

Each chapter ends with an “amplifier” sidebar in which I digress from my life and discuss the history of metal, or its themes and importance, in more detail. If you remember the 80s and 90s and life before the internet, how we bought and consumed music before Spotify and YouTube, you’ll get mainlined nostalgia for a brief point in time that no longer exists. If you grew up in the New England region, you’ll recognize a lot of the venues where the events unfold. Some of these venues have been bulldozed into the ground, which might be for the best.

I was further spurred to write this book with the advent of generative AI and large language models (LLMs). These are machines that “create” using machine algorithms and aggregated text others have written. LLMs are powerful tools which I believe have a useful purpose… but not in creative spaces. I draw a firm, unwavering line when it comes to using AI for the arts. After all, the life I lived was profoundly human, full of awkward romance and painful mistakes, occasional catastrophes and towering triumphs. Of a modest sort, but not to me. The writing needed to be mine. It’s 100% authentic meat space, and I was adamant my voice would be mine, not a machine.

I hope you enjoy Growing Up Metal, learn something from it, and perhaps recognize something of yourself in its pages. And if you’re at the right age, at a pivotal time in your life, it may even help you make different choices, ones I might have made to change the course of my life.

Growing Up Metal is complete. I hope it strikes a heavy power chord among metal fans, maybe something akin to the shock we feel when Judas Priest starts into The Hellion/Electric Eye. 

I think it rocks.

If you’ve liked what I’ve had to say here over the many years, please consider picking up a copy. Consider it my personal mix tape to you. 

Growing Up Metal cover reveal

(note: this was the lead item in my free weekly email newsletter Arcane Arts. Sign up the link or at the widget at right)

I had some difficult decisions to make regarding the cover of Growing Up Metal. I engaged a cover designer and he sent me four treatments, three of which I liked but had to dismiss.

Spinal Tap volume dial: A bit too plain and a bit too clever.

Guitar: Clean look, great font, but implies I play the instrument.

Average dude with silhouette of guitar hero—near perfect, nearly the cover. But I could only pick one. 

It lost out to this one.

The winner. Fuck yeah!

Why did I go with this cover?

1. The over-the-top imagery and garishness. All characteristic of metal.

2. It's nostalgic. For a time of tapes, and of a time when heavy metal was new and vital and emerging from primordial sludge.

3. Its symbolism. The figure that is vaguely me stands atop the music that has helped make him who he is. He is made of metal.

4. It places me on the center stage. The book is a memoir, and the story is my own.

My cover designer nailed it. My only edits were to add a few more metal touches (amplifiers to match the “amplifier” sidebars you’ll find in the book) and a picture and the copy for the back cover design.

I hope it grabs you as it did me and inspires you to give Growing Up Metal a read. It’s almost ready for print.

This week I set up my Amazon Author account, which included enabling two-step verification, scanning my face (!) and driver’s license to verify my identity, and connecting my bank account to ensure I can receive payments.

I also selected a half-dozen representative photographs for a picture collage included in the back matter. I purchased two ISBNs, one each for print and digital editions. Next I’ll be exporting the final print-ready file and uploading it and the cover to the KDP platform. Setting the price, filling in the details and marketing copy on the Amazon website.

And pressing publish.

An email from marketing guru and author Seth Godin hit my inbox as I was writing this issue: On the Verge of Done. It can’t be a coincidence.