Countdown: The Top 20 Stephen King Works of American Gothic Short Fiction--#11

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#11. "Cycle of the Werewolf"

First, for those who would accuse me of fudging: I hold that Cycle of the Werewolf qualifies as "short fiction" as defined for the purposes of this countdown.  The book's page count shrinks considerably when you take away all the Bernie Wrightson illustrations, and the actual text of the narrative places it squarely within the novella range.

In this werewolf equivalent to Salem's Lot, a "shadow" has fallen over Tarker's Mills, Maine, a quaint little town "where baked bean church suppers are a weekly event, where small boys and girls still bring apples to their teachers, where the Nature Outings of the Senior Citizens' Club are religiously reported in the weekly paper.  Next week there will be news of a darker variety."  That's because starting in January and proceeding methodically each month, a predator savages a victim on the night of the full moon.

King crafts an engrossing mystery regarding the human identity of the werewolf, while sounding notes of duplicity and distrust.  In a fevered dream, the Reverend Lester Lowe preaches a Homecoming Sermon whose subject is THE BEAST WALKS AMONG US: "he may smile and say he is your neighbor, but oh my brethren, his teeth are sharp."  Likewise, Constable Neary opines while sitting in the town barbershop that the Full Moon Killer "could be anybody--a teller at the bank, a gas-jockey at one of those stations out on the Town Road, maybe even someone right here now."  Neary's theory is that Tarker's Mills is dealing with an ordinary lunatic, a "werewolf" only "in the sense of being an animal inside and looking perfectly normal outside."  The irony, of course, is that aside from the the actual supernatural creature plaguing it, Tarker's Mills has plenty of residents who fit Neary's description--such as the hardly-mild-mannered librarian Milt Sturmfuller, who "puts his wife in the hospital over a bit of egg that the dishwasher didn't take off one of the plates" (don't worry, this brute receives his lycanthropic comeuppance in November).

Appropriately, the least likely suspect proves to be the werewolf ("it was simply impossible to think of that person, of all persons, being the killer.  Neary would have believed his mother the killer before he would have believed that").  In a terrific scene, the monster (in human form under a waning moon) is finally unmasked on Halloween night by a trick-or-treating child.

As seen most recently in Under the Dome, King is a master of the small-town-besieged storyline.  Never though, has he written more succinctly and entertainingly on the subject than in the dozen episodes of this calendrical narrative.  The months fly by like minutes in Cycle of the Werewolf, a gripping (and at times grisly) work of American Gothic short fiction.