By Anne Rice
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95, 404 pages
Anne Rice is back with another winner – her writing has gained a maturity, an elegance in the unfolding that was only dabbled in her previous work. She’s always carried a romanticized writing voice; one that carefully paints the beauty surrounding her characters and their settings. In The Wolf Gift she adds to her signature writing a slower, more methodical pace to the descriptions and invites the reader to observe, smell, analyze and dissect every aspect of the story.
The Wolf Gift begins with a young reporter, Reuben Golding from a prominent and successful family. He commissions himself to report on a historic mansion with an intriguing history and meets Marchant, for whom he falls deeply. A tragic event kills Marchant and wounds him in the process. But, it did more than that. It gave him the Wolf Gift. Quickly, he analyses his transformation changes and new strengths and uses his new gift to battle evil and save victims he runs across.
Typical with Rice’s novels, she surprises her readers by taming down the supernatural and weaving a modern day, casual, engaging story. When other writers would go straight with the horror, she idealizes it and makes it a plausible and gripping story. The Wolf Gift will proudly be on my shelf with her other classics. This is storytelling at its best!
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