In 2005, I was home with a toddler and a breastfeeding infant, the biological imperative to be a stay-at-home-mom overruling my hard-wired desire to write. I felt trapped, and spent a lot of time asking God why he made me a writer and then set me in a place where writing a coherent paragraph was less likely than taking an uninterrupted shower.
The Wolf Gift
It was during this conflict of callings that a friend suggested I read Anne Rice’s most recent book. The proper-church-girl in me responded with scorn, “I don’t read vampire books.” (I have since had ample opportunity to repent of that attitude.) But this was Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt, the story of Jesus’ childhood, written with deep respect, reverence and imagination. Anne Rice was no longer the author who would celebrate a book launch by throwing herself a mock New Orleans-style jazz funeral. This is Anne Rice, the devout Catholic, who after returning to the vibrant faith of her childhood has dedicated and sanctified all of her writing for Christ.
For me Out of Egypt, and its sequel Christ the Lord, the Road to Cana, lifted Jesus from the two-dimensional flanelgraph understanding and made him real in a way I hadn’t experienced since watching the movie Passion of the Christ. As a tryptic, the two books and movie underscore the verses most difficult to understand, the human part of Jesus who was fully God and fully Man.
For me as a writer, Anne did something else, she demonstrated in glorious detail that a Christian author does not have to write with hackneyed prose and be limited to stories about people wearing bonnets. And, to my immense delight, when I sent her an e-mail thanking her for her work and inspiration, she responded with a kind and graceful note.
The Wolf Gift is her most recent novel and at first blush seems to be a reversion to her previous fascination with the supernatural. The Wolf Gift is about werewolves, violent werewolves, and cruel humans and extramarital sex of all sorts. It might be a little much for the chaste bonnet romance crowd, but hang on with me for a minute longer.
In the back of Out of Egypt, and in her recent biography Called out of Darkness, Anne evaluates her previous body of work. Writer Patricia Snow sums up, “Of her secular books—books about creatures ‘shut out of life, doomed to marginality or darkness’—(Anne Rice) says flatly, ‘These books transparently reflect a journey through atheism and back to God. It is impossible not to see this.’”
That journey is deliberately explored in The Wolf Gift.
The protaganist, Rueben, is a gifted reporter but dismissed by nearly everyone he respects because of his youth, beauty, gentle nature and his trust fund status. His has been a charmed life, gifted with everything he could want except the one thing he truly longs for – respect. Until the night he is bitten by a strange, unseen beast. Within weeks he finds himself struggling with the curse – and the blessing – that he comes to call the wolf gift.
More surprising than his ability to transform from human to werewolf form, is the imperative he feels at a biological level to defend the innocent from violence. Soon the news outlets are tracking the exploits of the Man Wolf as would be rapists and murders are dismembered and eaten, while the rescued tell tales of a beast who treats them with extraordinary gentleness.
Rueben finally has to leave the city to get away from the voices of the victims he hears all hours of the day, wondering to himself, “God, what is it like to be You and hear all those people all the time everywhere, begging, imploring, calling out for anything and anyone?” It seems that Rueben and others like him are one of God’s answers to those cries. Perhaps Anne is saying we all are supposed to be the answer…
Rueben’s brother, Jim, is a Catholic priest, a good priest who serves his impoverished parish well. Unable to keep the secret to himself any longer, he confesses everything he’s done – killing numerous people who were about to kill others – and that he couldn’t make himself feel bad for it, it was a moral as much as a biological imperative.
Finally, Jim says, “May God protect you.”
“Why would He do that?” Rueben asked.
“Because He made you. Whatever you are, He made you. And He knows why and for what purpose.”
Finally Rueben finds some answers from other Morphenkinder, who have been working out what the wolf gift means to them for centuries. One of the oldest imparts this word of wisdom, “You are creatures of body and soul, wolfen and human, and balance is indispensable to survival. One can kill the gifts one is given, any of them and all of them, if one is determined to do so, and pride is the parent of destruction, pride eats the mind and the heart and soul alive.”
Replace “wolfen and human” with “eternal and mortal”, and you end up with credo to live by.
This is not a “Christian” book in a traditional sense – but the spiritual issues Anne explores are eternal. She raises questions of morality and purpose, love and justice, faith and experience, and not all of them are answered. But then, these are answers we really need to find for ourselves.
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