Part 4: "Wolfboys"

The first try

Continued from Part 3

My purpose, here as everywhere, is to be honest and truthful, but sometimes it happens that I accidentally lie.

I remembered that I had actually begun the novel whose working title was The Grandmaster before starting Moonglow, then afterward resumed. But I remembered wrong.

Between those final production documents for Telegraph Avenue from March 2012 (with my design for a custom Yaphet Kotto t-shirt design as a coda to that book¹) and the January 2013 file, “Grandfather,” which, a month later, has been succeeded by one already calling itself “Moonglow”—bupkes! Not a trace of Grandmaster. It turns out that not only did I did never “resume” work on Grandmaster after the interruption by Moonglow—Grandmaster was not even the first thing I tried to write after finishing Moonglow.

Instead, that was a novel with the working title of “Wolfboys.”

Wolfboys emerged in conventional Shelnutt style: with an idea—a future where the masters of a burgeoning Terran interstellar consortium have taken advantage of (and, perhaps, generated) a virus that is turning Earth’s adolescent boys into feral half-beasts, who are deployed as the shock troops of empire—and the Jack-magical bean of a first sentence, which occupies a file all to itself, highlighted in orange, above.

It started for Gawayne—he was a kid then, my kid brother—pretty much the way you hear, coming home one afternoon, blood on his lips and teeth and no memory of whose.

Not a finished first sentence, yet. Clunky, bumpy, not quite grammatical. It needed to be put through the Shelnutt mill. But as you can see, I was already asking myself, and starting to answer, those crucial questions mentioned in a previous part of this series: Who is speaking, and why now, and in what manner, and in what time and place, and of whom, and where are those people, and what do they want?

I wrote that sentence, and only that sentence, on July 8, 2016, a Friday evening. Its solitariness, and the file’s .txt extension and default first-sentence filename suggests a certain impulsiveness, inspired jotting. In Dallas, a couple of hours earlier, a Black, Army-trained sniper named Micah Johnson had shot and killed five white cops at a rally protesting the recent killings by police in Baton Rouge and St. Paul of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Yet there may have been no connection at all; the idea was one that had been percolating for many months.

In a new file, created a week or so later, I scrapped the sister’s POV, and wrote from the point of view of a “wolfboy” himself:

You probably heard about how Something got tangled in the genes of boys, a knot no doctor could unriddle. We turned by the millions into wolves.

It was a bloody scene in my house when it happened to me. Not a wolf, exactly. I had no true snout but my teeth knew how to do the work. They bore carnivore arcs and strategies of meat. The thought I had, as I grappled with the art of turning lupine was that it filled my nostrils, like a flood filled a bucket, with a dense report, down to pocket knives in pockets. I scared my mother so bad she hit me with a kitchen thing, spiked like a pineapple. I ate my dog that I loved and didn’t even feel sorry till the next day. But in the high grey Aptowers at the edge of the broken city, where the hunger is worse and people live all in violence and violent game, I heard about worse scenes than that, let me tell you. Something needed to be done with us hungry boys, with us hairmonsters. Us enzyme-freaks fitted out with an unbearable craving for the meat of other creatures.

My name when I turned nine was Billy Hobart but at Nine you get a new one, as a precaution, and that the name that they give you is Wolf. I was not yet a full hungry boy and I may not yet become one. Not everyone has the twist; everybody else has it twice. The first time is when you I tirn when I turned wolf [MC: sic]. Most of us turn out to be somewhere around nine years old. It starts from the inside out. Your bones break very slowly, so slowly you feel only a fizz of pain, It takes months. Meanwhile your organs thicken in the thin places and turn dense where they used to be light. There is not enough air in all the city of Aunt Francisco to fill my lungs, I could breathe it all in at once and take off into the sky like a hot air balloon. A hairy hot air balloon.

I don’t love this; it doesn’t ring true to me, doesn’t sound like the authentic voice of some posthuman boy who has undergone a horrendous physical and presumably mental alteration. It sounds to me like I was already feeling a bit stuck or stalled, stylistically-narrationally (they are the same thing), and have decided to jump clear into another character. I hear myself straining a bit to find a kind of sprung mutant-Huck-Finn register, and from certain constructions (unriddle, strategies of meat, hairy hot air balloon), I would guess that before I started this particular writing session I may first have dosed myself with some Barry Hannah, or Blood Meridian, or perhaps even (she hit me with a kitchen thing) the Benjy Compson section of The Sound and the Fury, and then just “had at it.” It’s hastily composed, and The first time is when you I tirn when I turned wolf is kind of just nonsense. One might guess that I had been drinking (I don’t drink).

The big problem, as so often with horror in literature, was to represent the unrepresentable. This is tough enough at the purely physical level, where it leads to infamous Lovecraftianisms like the “phantasy of prismatic distortion [that] moved anomalously in a diagonal way” in “The Call of Cthulhu.” At the psychological level, where the task is to humanly inhabit an inhuman mind, it takes a bold and sustained imaginative effort, something on the level of John Gardner’s Grendel—far more effort, evidently, then I was willing to give it.

In the next version², created in early November, I went back to the narrating older sister. That was the smart thing to do; it returned me to what felt—what must have felt, I can’t honestly say I remember for sure—like an appealing “Clever Maiden”-type fairy-tale track—a girl on a quest, telling her own story, driven by love of family and a sense of duty. Not Huck Finn but True Grit’s Mattie Ross. I started like this:

People said how in a house where a boy got turnt there were signs and prefigurations: your cat acting witchy, your dog running away, a thread of rot in the air, a mouse dead three days inside a wall. A vinegar smell, as I also heard it described. There was no kind of agreement on any of this, and nothing to be done about it, anyway. A turnt boy was not subject to prevention.

With Royal there was no smell but the usual atmosphere of roses sprayed from a can, a habit of our mother's. The dog, Astroboy, stayed put; we never did own a cat. And then on an innocent Saturday I woke up and there was blood in the hallway, the black flap of an ear. I followed a trail of blood into the alley and found Royal curled up on the ground, half-asleep, with blood all over his muzzle. He had torn up Astroboy and eaten most of him and I did not know whether it was worse to picture how that barbaric act unfolded or to see what remained.

As to the smell of roses, there were a dozen in a vase on the table in the front hall, but it turned out they did not give off much odor at all. They were just there as a cover for the flood of spray-can deodorizer our mom had used to drown the house when she first caught wind of that foretelling smell, which though I loved Royal and deservedly so, for he was a very good brother and a fairly good boy, I had not myself detected.

This Mattie-esque narrator promised to connect my opening to the projected middle part of the novel, in which having stowed away on the ship bearing her brother and his fellow wolfboys to a planet under conquest by humans, she would meet and form a familial bond with the enigmatic figure of Oldbrough, a taciturn “beastrunner” whose job was to train, control, and enchant the posthuman boys.

The above is as far as I went with that iteration, but I see improvement. I think the choice of a formal, slightly antiquated tone, with a touch of the southern-gothic echoes I spoke of above, avoiding contractions and overt slanginess or pseudo-slanginess, was a solid choice for a “teenager of the future.” When you have your teenaged narrator address the reader in an invented future slang or jargon you both stand in the shadow of A Clockwork Orange and Riddley Walker, and court the goofiness of the space hippies in the Star Trek episode “The Way to Eden” with their “I reach you,” and their “That would sound!”, of Anakin Skywalker and his pals going around calling everything Wizard!

You’ve got a hard lip, Herbert.

But setting a novel in the future implicitly requires the deployment of distancing effects. I chose this inverse approach, implying distance from the future by evoking some narrator of the past.

Speaking of teen slang, I had heard my household teenagers using the then- (possibly still-) current word, “turnt” to mean “drunk.” I had been looking for a non-technobabble term people might use casually to describe the effect of the theriomorphic plague affecting the world’s boys, and I debuted “turnt” as in, “turnt into a wolfboy.”

By the end of November, 2016—I had three chapters, about five thousand words. Pretty paltry—my daily routine is a thousand words a day—but it was as far as I ever got.

I have found myself hesitant to sharing these chapters, because they are incomplete, not only as collections of well-wrought sentences but conceptually, imaginatively, in terms of world-building and characterization. But I’m committed, as I said, to honestly and truthfully and faithfully documenting my wandering in the nine-year-labyrinth, lying only by accident. And so, here goes.