Daniel P. Mannix, The Wolves of Paris

Daniel P. Mannix's The Wolves of Paris was recommended by a friend, or I'd surely never have picked up a copy (I got a 1978 hardback first edition for $2 on Amazon). Based on a kernel of historical information, The Wolves of Paris tells the story of a half-wolf, half-alaunt known as Cortaud (Cut-Tail) who, in the bitter winter of 1439 laid siege to the city of Paris. People within began to starve to death rather than face him and his pack.

The novel is highly anthropomorphizing, with Mannix granting the animal protagonists the full range of human emotions. The wolves love, hate, lust, fear, plot, harbor resentments and plot revenge. The writing style used to convey these emotions is utterly gaudy, matched by the narrations (and there are a great many of these) of extreme violence. The wolves' natural prey of deer and the like have been depleted and mismanaged, and so in desperation they to eating corpses left from the constant state of war that plagued France throughout the fifteenth century. From this, it is only a small step to hunting the living. Mannix gives us scenes in which men, women and children are torn limb from limb, and eaten before they have quite finished dying.

Pitted against a remarkable (quite improbable) series of foes, including a leopard and an eagle, before it is all over, Cortaud shows time and again his fierce, fearless nature. The narration is fairly informative -- filled with medieval hunting terminology and tactics, as well as information about wolves -- but is also absurd, over the top, often laughable and tacky.

And yet, I kept reading. Straight through. Enjoyable, lively, bloody, silly fun. It is something of a folly of a book, well worth the $2 I spent on it.