Ravenous: Ray Garton

Emily Crane is on her way home when her car breaks down. Stranded and alone, her cell phone dead, she ends up raped by a foul-smelling madman with silver eyes who howls as he does his thing. She ends up killing him and is rescued by passers-by. Her husband Hugh meets her at the hospital and takes her home to take care of her. It’s an awful night in Big Rock, CA, as Sheriff Hurley is about to discover: a rape perpetrated by a man who is most likely not the serial rapist running around town, a dead, naked rapist who gets up off the morgue table and a deputy who ends up dead and partially eaten.

Things get worse from there: more deaths, a scarred up stranger coming into town, and the werewolves; it seems lycanthropy is an STD with a 24 hour gestation period, and Emily contracted it from her rapist. Too bad she had sex with her husband. Too bad he’s cheating on her. Too bad his mistress gets her dirty ass raped by the serial rapist. Before you know it, BANG! Werewolf infestation.

Ray Garton didn’t write a terrible book with Ravenous, but I question his methods. If you’re going to write a werewolf novel and change everything except the transformations and silver, why not just make it about something other than werewolves? Why not, say, ghouls or lichs or chupacabras or Satanic brainworms or anything. Every author wants to be remembered for something unique, so why not start with a unique adversary instead of attempting to reinvent an overused one. Me, I’d rather read a book about brainworms than another werewolf novel any day.

Beyond that, I kinda got the feeling that Garton hit the 330-page mark and was like, ‘Time to end this,’ and just blasted out the last chapter without really considering what he set up before that. The ending is unfulfilling, almost trite and gave me the feeling he didn’t really care how the story ended, just that it was over. I’m all for brutalizing your characters – and don’t get me wrong, Garton does a good job of that throughout the novel – but there’s a difference between brutalizing characters and not caring about them, and I can only really feel the latter going on through the third act of the story.

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Mass Market Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Leisure (April 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0843958200
ISBN-13: 978-0843958201