What follows will possibly reveal major plot elements and conclusions. You’ve been warned.

Within The Thief of Forthe and Other Stories (2018), published by DMR Books, there lurks a horror tale I highly recommend you read when the moon is bright and Halloween night draws near: “The Werewolf Howls,” written by Clifford Ball.

This is a story that howls in tones of Gothic horror and weird fiction.

It shakes off dust and awakens to wicked vitality, like an ancient beast roused by keen senses.

It shares its vision and hues.

Its diseased colors are marks of that bestiality.

Clues.

Doom, death, and time weigh upon everything within its story, which points toward the fears and failures and corruption working inside French society (low and high), the French bourgeoisie and aristocracy, and French authority.

Silver and grayness murmur throughout the tale. A symbol indicative of a legacy of failure and fraudulence. A sign of doom, age, decay, and weakness, which creates associations to the inhuman and the profane unknowable, the scapegoat otherness, the satanic animalism, the wizened barbarism.

But, in addition, this harbinger is in a rare overlap with the forbidden or unloved, which humans spurn ad nauseam in naiveté.

Gray and other colors of vast time, exhaustion, the sallow, the burnt, the decadent—these come to life looking for new blood, for renewal, for destruction. It is a familiar butcher. It terrorizes, whispers of indefinability and inevitability. Old curses. It is a numinous tone. The material and the unreal. The quick, the slow. Mercurial. Quicksilver.

White and black. Silver, gray, and yellow. These colors dominate.

A faint whisper of blue. Sorrow and tainted virtue.

These animals have their own chromatic enchantment to give.

Moonlight. Darkness. Twilight. Night is alive.

Bones. Hair. Fur. Animal colors.

The main character, Monsieur Etienne Delacroix, is attached to curious colors, behaviors, and impressions. He has no respect for the lower classes, but he reveres God. Religion appears more like a crutch on him. He acts in shades part-man, part-bestial.

He bursts, he roars, yet is he tired and old. His hand is heavy, trembling, but his fist strikes with power. He challenges. He chokes. He is red temper. He strikes awe. He is wrath. He is quiet and tender but can be incoherent. Emotions twist him. He is leonine, and his hair is gray and ashen. His brows are bushy, not kempt. Love and cruelty are in his eyes, which can also stare vacant.

I consider Monsieur Delacroix to be most likely a man currently residing in the aristocratic caste, mainly due to his veins being described as blue, which could represent his patrician status. I also believe that his financial and political status being somewhat vague adds layers to the symbolism.

There could be one or two implications that Etienne Delacroix comes from peasant stock. Most strikingly of which—his fingers have signs of hard work.

Toil is not something normally associated with the gentry, the affluent, or aristocratic lifestyles.

Why should he have the marks of labor upon him?

We are told he dislikes showing emotions, forming an escalating juxtaposition between how he wants to behave and how we see him behave.

That repression could provide a clue to the werewolf mystery and to the hidden depths of this character.

Bearing in mind those details, and keeping in consideration how Etienne appears to have contempt for the lower classes, the curse of the werewolf could be seen as a clash between upper-class and lower-class identities.

A character pretending to be a blueblood.

A blueblood loathing that their ancestors of long ago were peasants.

An aristocrat, fallen on hard times, reduced to moil.

This character could be secretly ashamed of the more olden end of their lineage, or ashamed of their unfortunate lot that has positioned them nearer to the lower classes.

On the subject of French society and supernatural fiction, I am reminded of the fabliau "The Peasant's Fart (Le Pet au vilain),” by Rutebeuf, which I found in a hardcover version of The Fabliaux (2013), which was translated by Nathaniel E. Dubin, has an introduction by R. Howard Bloch, and was published by Liveright Publishing Corporation.

"The Peasant's Fart” is a comedic story which jokingly claims to explain why peasants cannot go to Heaven or Hell.

Of course, "The Peasant's Fart” is satiric; however, if the poor were denied postmortem resolution, where would they go after death? In that scenario, are they doomed to endless wandering? Where only the undead roam among the living? The cursed afflicting the living?

Unable to live, unable to die, never saved but not entirely damned, unable to be fully human but unable to be totally spirit.

A transformed, fluctuating being emerges that corrupts and defies common identity, nature, and humanity.

When one holds all those concepts in mind, “The Werewolf Howls” conjures many fears related to different kinds of poverty: a fear that perhaps the poor might be predestined to always be (even spiritually) poor, even after accumulating great material wealth, that they would forever be in hiding, pretending but doomed to a stasis of metamorphosis, forever stripped of humanity and salvation, forever denied catharsis; fearing the possibility of predetermined suffering and sin; fear of unavoidable perdition; anxiety about losing status and about what makes one even worthy of aristocracy; a fear of predestination; and a fear of belonging to no class, no people, no land, not belonging anywhere or with anyone.

Imagine that one might be stuck in a limbo where the forever miserable and deprived are waiting for nothing in a purgatory that can promise only oblivion.

The werewolf concept, too, is also a doomed creature that emerges between worlds, between identities.

It must live and die as a scourge that is inhuman and banished.

Those questions and concerns circle round to that idea that the lycanthropy in Ball’s “The Werewolf Howls” is linked to symbols of psychosocial, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic class struggles. The unfortunate fearing their troubles will haunt them and guide their actions towards greater misery and self-ruin. The rich and powerful fearing that they will be dragged down to lower strata, doomed to a state of self-destruction and atavistic, primitive savagery.

The forbidden, unwanted attributes, associated with the poor, are poured into an animal vessel.

The animal becomes a symbol of things the upper classes try to repress. Human nature. The beast within.

All things clash.

Nature against humankind. Money and poverty, both material and spiritual. Superstition against reason. Truth against faith. All that is Romish, Gothic, and Teuton against the Reformation.

That which the rich and overprivileged do not want to remember, that which they do not want to admit are their weaknesses too, are thrown into and projected upon the lower classes.

As the nouveau riche struggle to attain supremacy, to absorb the aristocracy, or overthrow them, they fight themselves and all that reminds them of what they were, or are, of their inherited poverty.

That kind of self-hatred can become like a wild animal inside.

The secret suffering of the lower classes becomes another kind of curse.

Remember, the werewolf is mentioned in the story as a demon, as something gray.

It is of two conflicting worlds.

To conclude, “The Werewolf Howls” by Clifford Ball reminds me of the kinds of stories I look for from the pulp genre. When I think of my favorite class of pulp, I’m thinking of literature of blood, of the macabre; I’m yearning for the weird and sordid, the tales scorned by the literati and academia and the uppity bourgeois bores; I’m looking for the yellowback, the Grand Guignol, Italian giallo, penny-dreadful works, The Yellow Book, and the kinds of writings that Clark Ashton Smith or Howard Phillips Lovecraft would have penned. As for the artistry of this horror story, I appreciated the decent use of colors and textures for creating a rich and deep attachment between the werewolf thing and Monsieur Etienne Delacroix and his environments.

If you’re like me, don’t miss it.

This Halloween, think of Ball’s werewolf story.

May the season of the monstrous and the old mysteries be majestic.

And cheers to Samhain!

Matthew Pungitore graduated with a Bachelor of Science in English from Fitchburg State University. He volunteers with the Hingham Historical Society. The town of Hingham, Massachusetts is where he was brought up, and he has lived there for many years. Matthew is the author of The Report of Mr. Charles Aalmers and other stories, Fiendilkfjeld Castle, and Midnight's Eternal Prisoner: Waiting For The Summer.

If you’ve liked what you’ve read here, check out some of Matthew Pungitore’s writings at his BookBaby author-page.

Contact him at: matthewpungitore_writer@outlook.com