blog/content/reviews/books/the-wolfs-hour.md

+++
title = "The Wolf's Hour - Robert R. McCammon"
date = 2019-02-16
updated = 2021-02-12

[taxonomies]
tags = ["books", "reviews", "werewolves", "robert r mccammon", "fantasy", 
"stars:3", "published:1989"]
+++

[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11551.The_Wolf_s_Hour):
Michael Gallatin is a British spy with a peculiar talent: the ability to
transform himself into a wolf. Although his work in North Africa helped the
Allies win the continent in the early days of World War II, he quit the service
when a German spy shot his lover in her bed. Now, three years later, the army
asks him to end his retirement and parachute into occupied Paris. A mysterious
German plan called the Iron Fist threatens the D-Day invasion, and the Nazi in
charge is the spy who betrayed Michael’s lover. The werewolf goes to France for
king and country, hoping for a chance at bloody vengeance.

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{{ stars(stars=3) }}

This is truly a weird book.

So you take the idea of mythical creatures like werewolfs. And you take great
events in history, like World War II. And then you mix both.

In one hand, the book is almost silly in its premise. And, as if it was a 60s
spy movie, it makes the hero always get the girl -- which is narrated almost as
a horny teenage vision of what sex could be.

On the other hand, there is a bunch of what seems real information: Locations,
dates, aircrafts, guns you name it. It's almost as the author really did some
research on geography and history about WWII events.

This dichotomy permeates the book in every place. The very beginning of the
book reminded of a site that gathered the most absurd adverbs: "like a ghost in
the night" and the like. So, at the very start, it feels like it is a bad book,
but then you get what seems like real events happening (with a touch of what
was done in Assassin's Creed series of games) and then it seems like a real
book. And then you get the horny parts and it goes back to silly.