Product Description

The second collection of short stories from the highly acclaimed author of the novels 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh' and 'Wonder Boys'. There are the two boys of the title story, locked in their own world of fantasy and make-believe, reaching out to each other to survive the terrible prospect of fatherlessness. 'House Hunting' shows us the grim spectacle of a couple whose marriage is in its death throes, and whose search for a happy home is doomed; in another story a couple struggle to overcome the effects of a brutal rape. Elsewhere, a family therapist comes face to face with the dark secret of his childhood, and an American football star down on his luck makes his peace with his father. The collection culminates in a daring and wonderfully baroque horror story 'In the Black Mill', which chronicles the terrifying fate that befalls an archaeologist as he uncovers cannibalism and ritual sacrifice in a gloomy Pennsylvanian town. Serious in their subject matter, yet shot through with wit, humour and compassion, these nine short stories demonstrate Chabon's ability to weave together comedy and tragedy with unforgettable results.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86801 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
'The young star of American letters, "star" not in the current sense of cheap celebrity, but in the old sense of brightly shining hope. He is a writer not only of rare skill and wit but of self-evident and immensely appealing generosity.' Washington Post 'What's most alive in this book is the witty and resonant prose that has always been Chabon's strength, a prose in which sharp observation shades into metaphor' New York Times Book Review

TLS
Chabon is a superb craftsman. He writes richly formal prose. Phrases are shaped to give pleasure in themselves'

Sunday Times
'Illuminated without exception by felicities of phrasing and atmospheric exactitude.'

Customer Reviews

A superb introduction to a talented writer
At its core, 'Werewolves in Their Youth' is a collection of eloquent and moving stories about the fragility of human relationships. Yet despite this fragility, you never quite shake the sense that in the alternately amusing, profound and downbeat stories in here, loneliness is as hopeless an alternative as conventional community. This book is, as a result, made of odd stuff indeed.

Chabon's characters are frequently outsiders, or people breaking through the limits of conventions both societal and self-imposed. The family unit remains the focus, the scattering of individual pieces of the post-nuclear American family. As such, the stories are bound by opposites- childbirth and child death, marriage and divorce, separation and reconciliation. Yet they remain effective in their own right.

The collection opens with the title story, 'Werewolves in their Youth', a story of absent fathers that manages to enter convincingly into a child's perspective. The father in 'Son of the Wolfman' is also absent, albeit in a more startling fashion, yet the stories follow a similar path of withdrawl and reconciliation. Or there's stories like the wrly comic 'House Hunting', where a drunk estate agent serves up a timely reminder of the innate difficulty of marriage to a couple of erotically uninspired newlyweds.

The stories here run the risk of being 'worthy'- the topics they handle are inherantly serious. In the hands of a less skilful writer, tales involving the mental scars of rape, paternal abandonment and childhood sexual trauma would seem too... forced. Too dramatic. Yet Chabon manages to tell his stories without emotional hysteria, managing nonetheless to get a rich vein of meaning from his motley band of pathos-ridden misfits.

The last story here, the schlocky parodic horror-story 'In the Dark Mill', initially seems an anomaly, an odd tale to end a volume of weighty (if accessible) realist prose. Yet its mixture of odd comedy and frustrated goals are familiar from the preceding works. As for the motif of cannibalism- well, who can think of a more potent metaphor for the destructive yet symbiotic nature of human relationships?

Don't let the 'big' topics put you off- 'Werewolves in Their Youth' is a quick read, written in the elegant yet fast-paced style of Chabon's best work. It could well be a good introduction for those put off by the sheer length of Chabon's magnum opus, 'Kavalier and Klay'.

In short- this is a fantastic collection. Highly recommended.