Bored Gay Werewolf and the case of werewolf cults

 

So I went down to London in November for a couple of events, one of which was a little talk with Erik J Brown at the Common Press Bookshop, and that was where I found Bored Gay Werewolf by Tony Santorella while I was waiting for the event to start.

The blurb says that Brian, an aimless slacker in his twenties, works double shifts at his waiter job, never cleans his apartment and gets black-out drunk with his restaurant comrades, Nik and Darby. He’s been struggling to manage his transition to adulthood almost as much as his monthly transition to a werewolf. Really, he is not great at the whole werewolf thing, and his recent murderous slip-ups have caught the attention of Tyler, a Millennial were-entrepreneur determined to explore exponential growth strategies in the mythological wellness market. Tyler has got a plan and he wants Brian to be part of it, and weirdly his brand of self-help punditry actually encourages Brian to shape up and to stop accidentally marking out bad tippers at the restaurant as potential monthly victims. But as Brian gets closer to Tyler’s pack and drifts further away from Nik and Darby, he realises that Tyler’s expansion plans are much more nefarious than a little lupine enlightenment…

The first chapter of this book has Brian waking up, hungover, after a night out having given an Irish goodbye to his friends. You see how he came out to his parents after dropping out of college and then telling them he was a werewolf. Then he ends up being a little late for work, and he sees in the paper that a jogger has been killed in an apparent animal attack, and he knows it was him. Then at the end of his shift, Tyler comes in, saying to Brian that he knows about him and suggests that the two of them meet up, and ends up giving him his business card. The two end up meeting after Brian realises he can’t get the thought of talking to another werewolf out of his head, and my god, Tyler seems like one of those annoying people you see in TV shows where everything he does is cool and heroic. The two trade werewolf stories of how they became them, Brian’s is really boring, and Tyler’s is this major hero story – because of course it is. It was kind of odd trying to figure out what Tyler actually wanted. It was like a start-up, but like a werewolf society start-up, and Brian decides to go along with it because, bless him, he’s got nothing else going on. The long and short of it with Brian is that he moved to the city he lives in to try and just get away, thinking he’d be able to figure things out there, but ultimately, he’s just keeping himself at an arm’s length from everything and everyone and sort of just floating through life.

Also, just as a quick aside: I did not think I’d have to read the word “bussy” in literature, but here we are.

Tyler almost felt like someone who was starting a cult for werewolves. I was thinking that when I was in chapter four, about how in certain games I’ve played – Fallout comes to mind – that there are charismatic people who end up getting groups of people to follow them and their order with the promise of some kind of control or salvation. But I will say, the further you read into the book, it definitely felt like a cult, like Tyler wanted to start this society where he wanted to be the grand master of it.

It was so interesting to see a werewolf book, or a werewolf story, be made so mundane. That is something I do find interesting, when fantasy is made plain. Because Brian is literally just a miserable mid-20s waiter with no direction in life, so throwing is lycanthropy into his life is wild. You see that he deals with it by drinking and basically just trying to ignore it. Even when Brian was training with Tyler and one of Tyler’s friends, Mark, in a werewolf style, even that would just seem so mundane – but like on purpose. Because Brian is literally, as the title says, a bored gay werewolf, that’s how the werewolf stuff and training all comes off too.

Brian ends up meeting Tyler’s friends at one point at his birthday party, and they’re all insufferable I won’t lie. They all came off as very tech start-up, we’re very important and rich kinds of people, or just the girls that came along with the awful men. Also, one of them basically wants Brian as a GBF and she ends up asking him if he’s a “gardener” or a “flower”, so he, rightfully, snaps at her and calls her out on it but then she obviously does that thing where she’s like “uwu I was only joking” and then starts crying. And honestly? She deserved to start crying.

As a character, since Brian is labelled from the outset as “bored, gay werewolf”, that kind of gives you the indicator of the sort of person he is. He has his moments where he does have his nicety, but since he’s just so desperate to get some control in his life, he often ends up doing a lot of unsavoury things. Like, basically joining Tyler’s cult, because he’s promised him all these amazing things and that he’ll be able to control himself. But then also, because he’s a werewolf, that’s not really something you can tell your everyday person, he’s often quite distant to Nik and Darby and ends up hurting them several times, because he really has no other option but than to do that. It’s also mentioned that he’s had to move because of his lycanthropy, so that has forced him to keep people at a certain point. He’s a very interesting character, because you can see that he’s so obviously flawed, and keeps being flawed throughout the book, but you can kind of understand why he does what he has to do and why he does it.

And then given how Brian is, it’s almost hard to talk about the side characters, even his friends Nik and Darby. Since he is so flippant and, even admits that he, keeps them at an arm’s length, you don’t really get to know them all that well. Like you know bits and pieces about them, but because Brian is the way he is, and there’s even a conversation about how his friends have let him in, but he doesn’t do the same for them. And since he’s just floating through his life, almost searching for what he thinks he should be doing, that reflects in the relationships that he doesn’t really have, and it’s all Brian’s fault.

Overall, this book felt like it could have been part of a duology or trilogy, but specifically the first book, before the hero falls into the world that they’re coming into. Like, right towards the end, that was when there was a dip of fantasy, or like a slightly deeper hint into the fantasy part by saying that there was more than just werewolves out there, but I appreciated that it just kept it to that, and didn’t bother explaining or elaborating. I enjoyed this book; I think it was something different from what I’d normally read – in that it wasn’t YA – but I really liked it, and I’m sure I’ll come back to it later.

Okay, bye!