(New rule: never trust a piece of writing which opens with a paragraph in parentheses.)
Where the fuck did this come from? I'm glad I now know. This book captivated me for several years before I finally broke down and grabbed a copy from Ramble House (the generous blokes who also published my book, Tail of the Lizard King). Experiencing the work for myself, combined with new developments online (for me), reveals that The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman was likely the product of Leo Guild, creator of such musty tomes as The Girl Who Loved Black and Black Bait and Black Streets of Oakland (to say nothing of Street of Hoes). Which, surprise, are racist and sleazy beyond any other '70s pulp I've seen. From what I know, that's a common discovery, even for people with more experience in '70s pulps than me. Brrr. Well, I don't know if the name is "Arthur Scarm" or "Arthur Scram"--apparently in the 1972 edition, probably-Guild is credited with both names. Speaking of 1972: that was two years after the release of the fifth of the endlessly tedious "Waldemar Daninsky" werewolf movies by Spanish director, actor, and super-fan Paul Naschy, originally called Walpurgis Night, but released in the U.S. as The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman. This book was intended as an adaptation of the film to build hype in an American audience. Unfortunately, Leo Guild was brought into the project, and he apparently decided to make this thing his own. And at the time there was no creative vision as hideous as his.
And I will say this: the legends are true. Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman is easily one of the most atrocious things ever published. This is perhaps the farthest I have ever gone in terms of a book and its sheer badness--prose-wise, it's so simplistic that it's almost a children's book, except full of misogyny, rape, and murder. The plot is everywhere, bouncing around through ten different story points in fifteen pages. And there are more tangents than in Tristram Shandy. I can only summarize the plot in a string of scenes, because there is not a shred of seriousness applied to having this be anything but a bunch of random events.
A werewolf is brought into a morgue. He is named Waldo, which is sorta like Waldemar Daninsky. The idiot coroner removes the silver bullet that killed him, and he comes back to life to kill the coroner and rape his assistant. Because Leo Guild wrote this and he was a fucking asshole, the assistant falls in love with him, as do two students named Genevieve and Elvira (sure, whatever), whom he also beats and rapes. We learn in detail that werewolves have enormous "wangs," and that burning werewolf pubes smell like perfume, which I swear to God is a thing I was forced to read. Genevieve and Elvira were previously searching for a vampire woman named Countess Wandessa "Wanda" de Nadasdy. I would say that's probably a joke on "Danasdy," but this was the name of an actual character from the movie (as were Genevieve and Elvira, I should say). Waldo and the girls finance their long quest using pirate gold that they find in what is total not a contrived sequence, and on this trip, Waldo fucks and murders the girls while trying to destroy Countess Wanda--because werewolves and vampires naturally hate each other, y'see. Harmless nonsense like Waldo using black magic to shrink a woman's breasts is intercut with scenes of Waldo whacking a woman against a wall until the room is splattered with the gory chunks of her body. This is probably the first book I've read which is written by a serial killer. This is followed by Waldo and Wanda forming an on-again/off-again romance culminating in their desire to become movie stars, despite the fact that Wanda has literally never heard the word "acting" before. In the end the two are forced to kill each other, as fate demands, in a scene where lesbianism throws Waldo into a berserk rage which is somehow not his fault.
Actually, if you did want to do a "Too Long; Didn't Read" synopsis of this book, it would be this: Waldo the Werewolf is an abusive, sadistic monster who at no point demonstrates any sort of legitimate affection for anyone around him besides himself, and yet somehow manages to get exactly what he wants with zero consequences, for 130 pages. In this universe, werewolves are boss, and I am not going far at all in saying that men are boss too. The most competent woman in the entire book is, of course, Countess Wanda, but she inevitably falls in love with Waldo and from there on out is a complete airhead. I don't even know why people are compelled to fall in love with Waldo (or do anything besides try to kill him, for that matter), because, well, look at that cover. It probably does a better job of making Waldo look like a werewolf than the actual story does: in the book, Waldo only turns into a werewolf one night out of the year, and every other time, he's just an ordinary dude with a weird garter-belt of fur around his torso, which I unfortunately imagined as the fluffy cock-sock from The Cross of Seven Jewels. Every werewolf apparently has this, in addition to having hollow eye-teeth and an inability to ejaculate.
The book is all about Waldo, and that is a large reason why this book is so repugnant. But this is the A-List; by now, you should know that I have a fascination with the repugnant. The overwhelming amount of violence in this book, both general and sexual, forced me to draw comparisons to Hogg or American Psycho, where the general premise is the same: an evil person, who has virtually no directly-explained motivation, tortures a bunch of usually-faceless, nameless, helpless victims. Now I would like to say that I enjoyed Hogg and American Psycho very much, even if they're not books I can get back to on a regular basis. (Hogg especially.) That's why I was charmed when Waldo kept pulling the thing where he tells someone that he's going to kill them horribly, and because that's not something people usually say in the open to people they just met they assume it was just a joke, until it is too late. But here's the primary issue: the two books I referenced above were well-written. Hogg constructs an atmosphere of its own by having simplistic prose--a product of the narrator being an uneducated child--and it sustains that atmosphere by never repeating its limited vocabulary, never getting stuck in patterns, except when it means to. American Psycho is a nightmarish labyrinth of yuppie faux-eloquence and brand names that keeps topping itself until we simply can't believe it anymore.
The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, then, is horribly written, and that means that we can't enjoy or endure Waldo in the same way we do Hogg or Patrick Bateman. I will only quote one passage, justifying it as the sole quotation by saying that 1) this is on the very first page; 2) there is no first person narrator behind the first handful of pages; and 3) the entire book is like this. Behold:
Perhaps I should first tell you what a werewolf is like. It was never adequately been described even by a werewolf's bride. [sic]
The most frightening characteristic of a werewolf is that he is completely unreliable. That is made obvious by a toothy smile that flashes on and off like a traffic light with no substance other than evil behind it. It is entirely possible that while you are lulled in passivity, by the werewolf's pleasant smile, he is planning to perform major surgery on you without benefit of doctor or even anesthetic. And the instruments he will probably use will be teeth and nails.
...hurts, don't it? I think I can rest my case.
Curiosity is what drew me to this book, but don't make my mistake, unless you're interested in seeing every literary convention be as thoroughly mutilated as the characters sadly trapped within its pages. This is a bad one, even for the time and market, and despite my lack of patience for the Waldemar Daninsky series, I would still be willing to check out Walpurgis Night to see if the two are even somewhat similar. If you took out the rape and misogyny, a werewolf movie with the consistency of a Goosebumps book would probably be pretty entertaining. But even the most sluggish and uninspired Daninsky film would be preferable to this.
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Image Source: Ramble House
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