Book Review: “The Wehrwolf”, by Alma Katsu

The wolf is no animal, but a type of man. And this man is dangerous.

★★★★★

Germany, 1945.

Something is lurking in the forest, surrounding the village of Scharweg. Are they Allies? Are they wolves? Or is it something coming directly from Grimm’s fairy tales?

I’ve had my eye on Alma Katsu for years – thanks to her Finnish-sounding name (which it is actually Asian!), I’ve been gifted a book of hers… and unfortunately never got around reading it.

Over the years I saw her name popping out from time to time, even adding some to my tbr… and if all her books are like this one, her fame is well-earned.

There is so much to talk about this short book, I can’t believe it’s only 79 pages!

The story doesn’t suffer from it, it’s barely touched – it develops organically, slowly and steadily, and the conclusion doesn’t feel particularly rushed.

I loved how she manages to draw you back in time, in the legends and believes of a small town, but more broadly German culture. I was surprised she was not German herself, but she did work as an intelligence analyst in the 1990s, and worked on genocides and mass atrocities.

That must be one of the reasons the themes of this book are so on topic.

And here is another thing that I loved about this book – the ease with which she can fit subtopics into the bigger one, without having the story to suffer from it.

In the bigger scope of the nature of men and what we perceive as monsters, a big topic on itself, she touches sexual harassment perpetrate by men with the excuse “boys will be boys“, the national pride that easily stirred some wicked men, the desire of belonging and doing anything in one’s power not to give up on it, and even putting up for discussion the degree of actual evil the Devil can be, if he can grant something good that God actually is not, not willing to.

Tell me something she did NOT discuss!

And the great thing is – nothing is pushed down your throat. Her style is so fluent and smooth, she doesn’t have to force reflection into it: they just fit perfectly. I was shocked.

Speaking of shocked: the folklore in this book was actually delivered, and the athmosphere is beautifylly crafted around it. It seems like you are experiencing first hand the power of the Reinhardswald, a near sacred place for Germans, where Grimm’s fairy tales come to life… or are they only fairy tales?

Whatever it’s lurking in those woods, monsters are real. Which brings us to the main character.

Meet Uwe Fuchs: a simple man that would do anything for his family. When the occasion acctually arises he doesn’t shy away, but what did he agree to?

Maybe other characters are not so well developed like Uwe, serving only the purpose of the story. But for the good job done on him, and the brevity of the book, I think we can condone her.

The character of Uwe starts with being a pure good one, and during the arc of the story we can follow him as he changes some aspects of his character under our eyes, never breaking the coherence with what he once was. He had some tough decision to make during the story, and he was often naive, but you can always trace it back to the man he was.

That is not only the point of the story, but it also shows how men are just that: men. The atrocities committed by mankind are not coming from some depraved monster, if you don’t take into account the dark part that resides in each of us, the wolf. It’s dangerous to presume that there is a distinction between men and evil, not to let mistakes from the past happen again.

Thanks to NetGalley, Alma Katsu, and Amazon Original Stories for an ARC of this book.