“An unholy predator on the prowl ” The small town of Lakeview offers little excitement for Duane, Savannah, and their friends. They re about to endure their ten-year high school reunion when their lives are shattered by the arrival of an ancient, vengeful evil. The werewolf. The first attack leaves seven dead and four wounded. And though the beast remains on the loose and eager to spill more … eager to spill more blood, the sleepy town is about to face an even greater terror. Because the four victims of the werewolf s fury are changing. They re experiencing unholy desires and unimaginable cravings. They ll prey on the innocent. They ll act on their basest desires. Soon, they ll plunge the entire town into a nightmare. Lakeview is about to become Wolf Land.”
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Now this is a werewolf story! The best werewolf story I have read! Bravo Mr. Janz! He gives us great characters, great visuals, scenes with emotions yet filled with blood and gore unimagined! Again, WOW! This is a good example of why I will read anything he writes, yup, he’s that good!
“She shivered and let her eyes rove over the partygoers.”
It pains me at just how long it takes me to read physical books these days. I can read an ebook on my Kindle in two-three days typically, sometimes in one sitting, but I typically can get in maybe 15-30 mins of actual physical copy reading a week.
Which is why it took me sooooo long to get through Wolf Land.
I was over the moon to snag 5 Flametree books in their Fourth of July sale and had been wanting to read Wolf Land for some time. So, I jumped on this one ASAP.
As you may know from reading my reviews/interviews etc, I’m a big-time werewolf fan and Janz delivers an epic tale of werewolf carnage.
We start off with a great opening, giving us some folklore to ease us in and then Janz literally throws us into the fire. The book brings us to a small town, back yard field party where the bonfire is raging and alcohol is flowing. I enjoyed how we were introduced both to the bit players but also the main characters and Janz intertwined their histories nicely.
What I loved about Wolf Land was how Janz gave us the George RR Martin treatment – no characters were safe. The ones you think will undoubtedly be around for all 300ish pages are slaughtered left and right and it worked really well to keep the reader on their toes.
I wish we were given more of the original back story/folklore, but by the end of the book, Jonathan had filled in a lot of the gaps and really gave us the origin story as well as the present-day story.
The climactic scene is an action movie lover’s paradise, with the descriptions coming fast and furious. I felt the tension build and rise as it played out and you could always feel how giddy the author was while writing much of this book.
I’ve joked on social media a bunch of times about this being the year Janz has 642 releases, but the fact he keeps putting out such high-quality stuff is very inspiring to writers but also makes for a fun time for fans and readers. If you’re not reading Janz yet, this would be a great spot to start the journey, and if you’ve been a longtime fan, but this is still sitting on your TBR, now’s a great time to bump it up to the top.
Insanely, I still have to read ‘The Siren and the Spectre’ and ‘Exorcist Falls,’ but also snagged ‘Dust Devils’ and ‘Savage Species’ in paperback from the Flametree sale, so have those two physicals to read!
Janz has catapulted himself high up my “an author I’m guaranteed to read” list and he should be on your list as well.
Let me put it up front here that Wolf Land is not one of my favorite Jonathan Janz books. Mind you, it’s still a good read, even it didn’t quite land for me the way his other releases have and I didn’t find it quite as compelling as Children of the Dark (my first Janz book, and the title that made me an instant fan and follower of this author) or, his latest, The Siren and the Specter.
At a bonfire party held days before their 10-year-reunion, a group of friends meet up only to have their lives turned entirely upside down by the appearance of a mysterious stranger, who proceeds to crash the party and launch a deadly attack upon these Lakeview grads. Oh, and did I mention the attacker is a friggin’ werewolf!?
As usual, Janz display an uncanny knack for staging and delivering a brutal horror show. The opening assault on these party-goers is absolutely vicious, as are several of the follow-up scenes as those newly gifted with werewolf powers become consumed by their inner beast and torment innocents to slake their fresh bloodlust. It’s interesting to see how these figures adapt and respond to their changing situations, as some become emboldened by it, while others are more afraid and cautious of, or even curious, about their own situations.
Weezer, in particular, is one of the more interesting examples. He’s the type of bad guy Janz is so damn proficient at creating, somehow making him immediately deplorable. Weezer is a big-mouth, an entitled, sexist, misogynistic, no good little prick right from the outset. You know every douchebag you wanted to punch in high school? That’s Weezer. Becoming a werewolf doesn’t make him any better from a humanitarian perspective, but I’ll admit that once he lost his overly crass ways in favor of adopting a more cunning, animalistic personality he became much more palatable. Which is a really weird thing in and of itself, to appreciate a quieter, more sociopathic evil than the annoying, loud-mouthed schmuck of a bad guy, but whatever… I guess these are just the times we live in now! His character has an interesting evolution, even as I must question what, exactly, it says about me. When Weezer was first introduced, I almost immediately wanted him dead, but as he grew into a more powerful force, I found myself curious what awful things he would do next and grudgingly accepted that he was going to be around for a while.
Unfortunately, most of what I didn’t like about Wolf Land comes down to the dynamic between lead characters, Duane and Savannah. I’m not the type of reader who needs to like an author’s cast, but I do appreciate not being annoyed by them. My biggest hurdle in all this was our main protagonists and, in the case of Savannah, our obligatory unrequited love interest. Oddly, I liked both of these characters on their own, but when put together with the potential for romantic entanglements, I found myself increasingly annoyed at the one-note tone to their relationship. Duane has pined for years over Savannah, but, frankly, given the way their relationship was portrayed, I have no idea why he’s so head over heels for her. Savannah is a single mother, and her past relationships with men have left her seriously burned and distrustful. Pretty much every conversation she and Duane have devolve into her complaining about men in general, with Duane fueling the fire with his Not All Men! arguments. I got tired of these two pretty quickly, and I wanted Duane to hurry up, get a clue, and go take a shower to wash off all that stinky desperation. She’s not interested in you, dude! Move on! Unfortunately, Janz drags out the will-they or won’t-they for nearly 300 pages, and it gets pretty damn exhausting.
I was also exhausted by the book’s climax, which goes on and on and on and on. Rather than feeling like an adrenaline-fueled, action-packed rush to the end, I found myself bored with the repetitious man versus werewolf scenarios and the very, very late-game addition of new villains, which only added even more scenes of been-there, done-that werewolf action. I can only read about so many different werewolves, all of whom end up suffering from various eye injuries of some kind, before the shine wears off. While I typically love the chompy bits of a creature feature horror novel such as this, as well as Janz’s novel settings in which to stage the action, the scenes themselves ultimately felt too similar and carried on for way too long.
On the whole, though, Wolf Land kept me engaged even as it’s most central protagonists frustrated the heck out of me. On the other hand, the supporting cast is strong and well rounded, and I found myself rooting hard for Melody, a young, traumatized woman who is abused in the sickest ways possible by her own family. Melody is like a character from a Jack Ketchum novel, plagued by sadists who you badly want to see torn apart in the worst and meanest ways. I also found Glenn and Joyce to be pretty compelling figures in their own regard. In terms of werewolf mayhem alone, Wolf Land certainly delivered with plenty of grandly violent and sadistic scenes throughout, even if the grand finale got a little too long in the tooth for my tastes.
Wolf Land is a wild, roaring, face-ripping ride!
Sometimes a reader finds themselves looking for a book which reads like the equivalent of a B grade movie. That’s the position in which I found myself last week, and since I recently interviewed Jonathan Janz for Horror After Dark, I thought this book would fit the bill. It did!
Now, when I say “the literary equivalent of a B grade movie”, that doesn’t mean the language or the storytelling were sub-par, because they most definitely were not. What I mean is that this is a book where you don’t need to do much heavy thinking. You just need to sit back and relax and let Jonathan get you to care for these characters. Before he does horrible things to them. Horrible, horrible things.
If you’re looking for a bit of relief from the stresses of daily life and you want to be entertained, look no further! Wolf Land gives you all the horrors and some humor as well. What more could you ask for?
Highly recommended for fans of gut ripping, intestines falling out kind of werewolf horror! Yeah, baby, yeah!
Checked this book out from my library with Hoopla.
A group of young adults are about to enjoy a high school reunion…that is until a strange man joins the bonfire.
The attack at the bonfire has become huge news but for the survivors, the nightmare is just beginning. For the strange man is the least of their worries, especially when he mentions that the Three are coming…and they will all be judged.
I loved this book. Very unique take on a werewolf story and the characters are very deep.
Definitely pick this one up, no disappointments whatsoever!!