A day late, but hopefully not a dollar short. I think this month's mini-essay suits spooky season better anyway, so I hope you can forgive me.
Read a few pieces by any writer, and you’ll begin to notice the patterns, motifs, and preoccupations that crop up across their body of work. One of mine is language. Even when it’s not at the forefront, it still ends up making its way in. The manuscript I handed to my agent last month is centrally a dark fantasy about angst-ridden queers who harvest the souls of the dead for profit, but I still ended up giving both main characters fraught relationships to their native tongues.
One of my earliest childhood memories is of confidently declaring that, since my family lived in Wales, we obviously spoke Welsh – and being very confused when my mum informed me that the language we lived our lives in actually belonged to next door. That probably has something to do with it.
Another of those obsessions is the relationship between human and non-human forms of life. Back in the days when I harboured hopes of an academic career, my PhD research focused on evolution in classic weird fiction, looking at the various ways authors have mined the fuzzy border between humans and other living beings for horror.
At first glance, these aren’t topics that naturally dovetail together. But the capacity for language has long been one of the things humans use to distinguish ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom – even though, from signing chimps to tool-using crows, we’re always discovering things that blur the boundaries. Most of us still experience language as intrinsic to our identities – but it can also be deployed in hostile, exclusionary ways.
This month’s newsletter isn’t brought to you by any kind of proper planning, but by a couple of recent fictional encounters that got me thinking again about these relationships. From this point on, you’ll find SPOILERS for Wolf Man (2025) and the story “Formerly Feral” by Julia Armfield. Scroll on down to the ‘Writing News’ section if you want to avoid them.
The Wolf Man film released earlier this year popped up on streaming a couple of weekends ago, and we decided to give it another look. The movie centres on Blake, an out of work writer and house-husband, who finds out that his missing father has finally been declared dead and takes his wife Charlotte and young daughter Ginger to pack up the remote farmhouse where he grew up. In an opening flashback, we see the young Blake, out hunting with his father, have a frightening encounter with a strange, humanoid creature in the woods. This is hinted to be a hiker who went missing after contracting a zoonotic disease called “hill fever”... or “face of the wolf”.
On their way to the house there's the obligatory ‘lost in the woods’ scene and a stop to pick up a childhood acquaintance whose condescending backwoods machismo rubs up uncomfortably against Blake and Charlotte’s less traditional dynamic. There are hints that Blake may have some insecurities bubbling beneath the surface. Then, they run into another werewolf. Blake gets scratched. They escape to the house, but as he and Charlotte try to protect their daughter from the wolf on the outside, on the inside, Blake is beginning to transform.
Wolf Man’s version of lycanthropy is a disease rather than a curse or anything else supernatural, degenerative in both senses of the word. As Blake grows sicker, his faculties deteriorate, and he begins to display more animalistic characteristics and behaviours. One of the first things to go is language.
Some of the most affecting scenes in the movie are those shown from Blake’s point of view as he transforms. As Charlotte and Ginger speak to him, their speech becomes murky and unintelligible, distorted as though heard from underwater. They begin to look less human, with sharpened features and cat-like reflective eyes. Dust motes appear huge, falling like snow or ash, as though Blake is in the Upside Down. We don’t know how much of what’s going on he understands, as by this time he’s unable to tell either his family or the viewer. The film is most effective when it keeps us trapped in this space: meaning withdrawn, communication impossible. It’s at least as much family tragedy as horror, and in these scenes, the loneliness of Blake’s transformation is palpable.
The breakdown of language is common shorthand for a loss of humanity. Here, it’s both symptom and cause of Blake’s exclusion from community and family. This could be the straightforward conservatism of horror at its most boring, but the father-daughter relationship between Blake and Ginger helps complicate it. Early on in the movie, there’s a scene where he asks her what he’s thinking and she pretends to read his mind. It’s clear that this is a running joke between them, but it’s emblematic of a real bond, and one from which Charlotte feels excluded. When Blake starts to transform, she seems less afraid of teeth and claws than of being unable to relate to her daughter without him. Blake and Ginger form a dyad more commonly associated with mother-child relationships.
Blake’s unemployment and his contrast to his father’s gruff, traditional masculinity hang in the background of the story, and it’s easy to read his transformation as a metaphor for resentment, a man who feels forced by circumstance into a traditionally feminine role reasserting himself with violence. But it’s ultimately the father-daughter bond that prevails and offers a measure of salvation. At the movie’s climax, the transformed Blake attacks his family, and Charlotte shoots him. As he lies bleeding on the forest floor, Ginger (named, presumably, for one of the most iconic female werewolves) is able to sense his thoughts, telling her mother that he just wants it to be over. They remain entangled across the human-animal divide. It’s not a happy ending, but it is a redemptive one. They are still able to reach each other, hinting that, even outside the bounds of language, other forms of understanding may be possible.
The other wolfy story I encountered recently – one which plays with similar themes of family and language – was Julia Armfield’s short story “Formerly Feral”, from her excellent 2019 collection Salt Slow.
The unnamed narrator, a young girl, stays with her novelist father when her parents split up, while her sister leaves with their mother. After a few months, the father gets remarried to a neighbour, who moves in along with her surrogate daughter – a pet wolf named Helen. Helen is fed at the table, dressed in clothing to match the narrator, and allowed to wander around the neighbourhood at will. The tone is somewhere between childlike simplicity and knowing absurdism, the narrator’s acceptance of her bizarre situation nudging the story toward fairytale. The adults around her are self-absorbed, wrapped up in their own preoccupations and largely indifferent to what she does. As she navigates adolescence with little input from them, she falls into a closer kinship with her new ‘sister’ and becomes more animalistic in her attitude and behaviour.
The story doesn’t foreground language in the same way Wolf Man does – the narrator never stops speaking – but it’s still important. At the beginning of the story, she clings hopefully to the letters she receives from her human sister, but it’s doubtful how much meaningful communication the words offer. Even at the beginning of their correspondence, the narrator is more interested in the doodles her sister leaves in the margins than in what she has to say, and for good reason – the sister writes in clipped, “postcard” phrases or grown-up platitudes that have little to offer this young wolf-girl. Along with their mother, she has withdrawn into a realm of normality where the narrator’s feral existence makes no sense to her.
Meanwhile, their father makes his living from words, but nor does he have much to offer in the way of meaningful connection. He views the world around him with a detached amusement, even when it’s horrific. Strange and traumatic events are raw materials to be mined for his novels. This detachment extends to his family. Helen and the narrator – his “feral girls” – elicit the same chuckling indulgence as a neighbour who likes to kill and taxidermy the neighbourhood pets. The novelist becomes a kind of traitor, taking what he needs from the world around him while ignoring his daughter’s very real problems.
She’s bullied at school by the normal kids who find her animal ways disturbing, and a boy begins to stalk her on her walks home. Ultimately, it’s Helen who helps her deal with her stalker, biting him hard enough he’s permanently injured. The wolf may not be able to speak, but she communicates her loyalty quite effectively.
This ultimately cements their bond, wolf-sister and human-sister escaping together into a realm where other forms of communication – smells, body language, teeth – are more important than speech. The narrator seems quite content there. When the story ends with her copying Helen’s wolfish instincts and sharpening her teeth, it’s difficult not to feel that she’s made the right decision in sticking with the sister who speaks her language.
Writing news
Not a lot to report this month. I'm several chapters in on the new novel and loving the autumnal 90s atmosphere of it, but taking a break to work on something else for a project I'm not allowed to talk about yet. I'm also imminently awaiting publication of a story and a review, so hopefully I'll have those to share with you next time.
What I've been reading
This month I've been mostly plugging away at
The Kingdoms
by Natasha Pulley for a book club. The premise sounds fascinating -- alt-history where Napoleon won and England is a French colony -- but so far the execution isn't really doing it for me. C'est la vie.
What I've been watching
Earlier in September I caught
The Long Walk
. I haven't read the Stephen King that it's based on, so can't comment on how it works as an adaptation, but it's brilliantly bleak with some great central performances.
What I've been listening to
Not much new this month, but I did catch an interesting
of the
Print Run
podcast about the so-called death of literary fiction. (Tl;dr: if you want to read weird stuff, go indie.)
That's it from me for now. 'Til next time.
JL