Hi everybody!
Today, I want to share with you an authentic cult book: “The Werewolf of Paris.” This is the quintessential lycanthropic bible. Most of the werewolf archetypes frequently seen in movies originate from this forgotten novel by Endore. This paperback, like almost any other gothic tale, begins with the discovery of an accursed manuscript, which tells us the tragic story of Bertrand Caillet.
Bertrand was the product of a non-consensual sexual encounter, and also he was born on December 25 overshadowing Christ’s birth. For this reason, he will be cursed with the werewolf metamorphosis. Bertrand is adopted by Aymar Galliez (who is the manuscript owner). Aymar realizes that Bertrand poses a threat to humans, and he attempts to control his killer instinct. Eventually, Aymar fails in his duty, and the beast breaks out of his home to move to Paris and torment humanity. In Paris, Bertrand takes advantage of the bloody context to act with impunity, because he arrives in Paris during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the establishment of the Paris commune of 1871. The characters’ most critical moments coincide with the most awful events of the war, the subsequent social revolt and the future counter-revolution. In fact, as we read the novel, we meet worse “wolves” than Bertrand in this Parisian society: bourgeois, aristocrats, the clergy, and even commoners.
I could not speak about this novel if I do not speak about its author, Guy Endore (1900-1970) an American writer, screenwriter of Hollywood movies, and activist. He lived his childhood between New York and Vienna, and when he reached adulthood, he moved to Hollywood to write movie scripts. Endore could be ranked among the great American horror writers, alongside Washington Irving, Edgar A. Poe, Ambrose Bierce, R.W. Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, Stephen King and Joe Hill. However, his novel, The Werewolf of Paris, never received a successful movie adaptation that would have brought him global recognition.
Critics and specialists in literature, translation, and demonology, such as Brian Stableford or Jacques Finné, have said that Endore’s opus magnum, “The Werewolf of Paris”, is for the lycanthropes myth what Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” is for the vampire’s myth. The lycanthrope and the vampire, together with Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, make up a trilogy of dream chimeras that have fascinated, then as now, the human collective unconscious.
by NoTwo4147