Werewolves leave readers howling for more

By: Izzy Bellinghausen

With the recent influx of vampire and werewolf novels, readers are constantly attacked by those dark nasties that go bump in the night. The sheer number of trite and stereotypical urban fantasy books filling Barnes and Nobles, makes the novel Moon Called by Patricia Briggs stand apart from the crowd.

Mercy Thompson, the main character, is a snarky car mechanic who can shift into a coyote form. She is friends with a ScoobyDoo obsessed vampire, the mega hot Alpha of the local werewolf pack, and her ex-boss car mechanic who is a metal kissed fae (fairy).

“I love Mercy because she doesn’t really fit in and being a history major turning into a car mechanic is the just the coolest thing in the world,” Chemistry teacher Patricia Plese said. “She’s a pretty rich character and she’s finding out what she’s made of as she grows.”

The fae bring in another new face to the novel, as the dark creatures who riddle the pages of the Grimms brothers’ original fairy tales. These seemingly harmless beings are unable to lie, but they manipulate the truth they tell very well after centuries of practice. Using magical guises to underscore their real dangerous potential, such as a little girl playing with a yo-yo, the fae are often the scariest and underestimated antagonists in the plot. A good rule of thumb when dealing with the powerful fae is to never utter thanks for a deed as a person who expresses such a statement could end up a life-long indentured servant.

The story begins with a strange boy who shows up in town and asks for work at Mercy’s auto shop. She uses her enhanced sense of smell to discover that the boy is in fact a werewolf, nothing she can’t handle since she was raised by werewolves as a child.

While most heroines tend to avoid mouthing off to entities that can eat them without chewing, this is definitely not the case for Mercy. Her sharp wit can dent a werewolf more than a silver bullet ever could. Relying on her cleverness and risking both life and limb on a daily basis, she is more often than not the one who does the rescuing.

For swooners of Edward Cullen, there are also plenty of hot male leads to ensure a more pleasurable read, but shockingly the secondary characters are just as fascinating and sometimes even more interesting to explore. Calls to come down and eat dinner by parents go unheard as beloved characters are constantly thrown into new challenges, ending in deaths or severe maiming.

Moon Called offers a wonderful read to those who, to put it nicely, scoff rather loudly at the Twilight fa- natics. Vampires and werewolves are viewed now as instant moneymakers, but if the writing is not up to par, then slogging through the fiftieth, bad fantasy novel can be unbearable. This novel combines a slew of memorable characters, sarcastic commentary, and suspense-filled action scenes to create a magical read.

“If you’re really into fantasy, there’s a lot more here than Twilight has to offer,” Plese said. “Once you got past the fantasy aspect of Twilight, it was just relationships between people. This has layers.”

At the end of the day, no matter how many bloodthirsty or powerful demons Mercy takes down, her most important priority is to run her garage and pay off her bills. So the supernatural entities that populate her life are no match to the collection agencies, giving the novel a more realistic flair in between the fae, werewolf, and vampire carnage.