FRIGHT FEST #5: The Night of the Wolf - Frank Belknap Long

So far in this Fright Fest of supernatural mystery reviews we've had ghosts, demons, vampires and zombie kittens (sort of ), haunted houses, animated skeletons, and macabre murders.  It was only a matter of time before I found a werewolf novel.  This one comes from the pen of Lovecraft acolyte and Arkham House refugee Frank Belknap Long.  Last time I reviewed a novel by Long it was Journey into Darkness that I whipped through while I was waiting for my panel to be called for jury duty back in 2011. That book is a weird, rambling, science fiction/horror novel that spent several pages discussing Jungian archetypes and the collective unconsciousness as well as the work of psychoanalyst and sexologist Wilhelm Reich.  So I was prepared for yet another rambling book from Long that would no doubt be filled with tangential or superfluous passages.  I was pleasantly surprised that it is a straightforward B movie on paper.  The entire story takes place within a single day (beginning around noon and ending in the hours after midnight) and easily could have served as the treatment for a 1970s TV movie.

The Night of the Wolf (1972)  opens with an over-the-top depiction of the slaughter of nearly an entire household.  Someone or some thing has beaten and clawed Margrave (no first name ever given), an archeologist colleague of our narrator John (no last name given). Later four more victims are found in various places around Margrave's home. Anne the maid, one of the victims, manages to utter a few bone-chilling sentences before succumbing to her gruesome wounds: "It was --it was not human.  I saw--it.  It  was--some kind of animal..."

The survivors --two men and two women--band together to find this "some kind of animal" and kill it.  In the meantime the sheriff is called to start a murder investigation and gather up all the corpses. His police department is too small of staff to handle such a grisly case with several murders he is sure are the work of an escaped madman. Therefore, he promises to deputize as many men as he can and set up a dragnet surrounding Margrave's home. This of course will provide Long with more victims to be mauled with gallons of blood sure to spill before the final pages.

As the back cover blurb already gives away one of the surprises I'll mention that Margrave and John are responsible for unleashing this beast.  Margrave is in possession of an artifact that John was unaware of his bringing back from their dig at a Bulgarian cave several months ago. Doris Margrave, the dead archeologist's daughter, tells of a visit from a mystery man who claims to have known her father. Two days prior to her father's murder this visitor had a heated argument with her father. The visitor named Ruschna vowed that the house will go up in flames and all will perish if the artifact which belongs to him is not returned. One of the women then spends much of the book (offstage and we only learn of this second hand in the final chapter) tearing apart the house looking for this artifact. You'd think John and Dan Shields, a house guest of Margrave's, would immediately look for the artifact and return it to prevent further violence and death, but they have to rescue Doris who is abducted by the wolf-like creature.

Before the climax involving the rescue of Doris from a cave by the seashore, there will be a near drowning, two more beast attacks, the recovery of a wolf-headed staff that most likely was used as a murder weapon, an arson attempt, a road accident involving a weasel, and several sightings of a half man/half wolf creature whose lower body looks like dwarfish human. It sounds like it an action oriented thriller, but sadly most of the book consists of long dull passages of talk, talk, talk.  John enjoys ruminating about everything from his love of Doris (often) to the psychic manifestations of Eastern Europeans. Exchanges between Dan and John are often inexplicably repetitive. This I ascribe to Long's past life as a penny-a-word "fictioneer." Old habits dies hard, for sure. Those pulp writers learned to drag out their stories with overly descriptive passages and circuitous dialogue just to pad out the story in order to make more money.

The Night of The Wolf is part of a series of nine paperback originals published by Popular library between 1972 and 1973 that supposedly pay homage to the Universal Pictures classic monster movies of the 1930s and early 1940s. Populated with vampires, reanimated corpses, zombies, Central American mummies, witches, she-demons and other supernatural creatures the "Frankenstein Horror Series" books are cult collectibles now. Many of them are incredibly hard to find. Those that are available for sale from online dealers tend to be exorbitantly priced.  But if you dig deep you may find a handful of these titles for under $15 which is the only sane price for any of these somewhat mediocre 70s horror novels.