Moondog A novel of suspense

Julian, California, is inhabited by a colorful cast of characters, from seemingly average middle-class folk to a choice selection of burnouts, dropouts, and social misfits. But no one in the small, mountainous town is prepared for the events that follow a lunar eclipse on summer. When a young woman disappears during an eclipse party, the townspeople nervously assume a marauding mountian lion has killed her. When her body is found, it bears the marks of an animal attack. But at the next full Moon, when a schoolteacher dies the same way, fear becomes hysteria-is a visious serial killer at work? Local resident and reclusive writer Cyrus "Moondog" Nygerski is struck with a deeper fearand is compelled to discover how the women really died. With Joe Action, a companion new to the area, he finds details of the killings that do not fit the pattern-and some that fit a more ominous one. And what he comes up with, laid out quite logically and frighteningly, is that there is a werewolf living among the residents of Julian. Impossible? There are no such things? Let Henry Garfield chillingly convince you in this eminently believable and beautifully written mystery.

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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY review January 23, 1995 Mystery and horror are combined with aplomb in this well-paced debut. The first three bodies found in a remote Californian town are women\'s, ripped apart and abandoned. Only one man, local recluse and enigmatic columnist Cyrus \"Moondog\" Nygerski, notices the similarities in the killings, particularly that the moon was full on the nights of the murders. No one except a recent parolee working nights at a local diner takes Moondog seriously until the fourth killing suddenly has townspeople eating garlic, wearing crosses, and loading silver bullets into their pistols. Garfield endows all of his suspects with wolfish mannerisms -- teeth grow long and pointy, sleepless nights are legion, body hair is rampant -- and gives none a half-decent alibi. The ending is thoughtful, and the subdued prose adds a lot of credibility to the tale.

Gahan Wilson review from Realms of Fantasy magazine Werewolf Mystery Adds Up to Fantastic Fun By Gahan Wilson This is a straightforward werewolf yarn that moves along in the classic pattern and follows the rules. The twist Garfield’s given to it is to have the action take place in convincing Steinbeck country amidst Steinbeckian folk, all of whom are quite well realized and true to the master’s leanings. It is a pleasant kind of “Wolfman visits Cannery Row,” which I found to be an unpretentiously entertaining book. The author has placed the action in the little town of Julian, located in the mountains in San Diego County, California. The town does exist and the descriptions are true to the place. Julian was a mining town which, like most other ming towns, went bust in a big way after the easily got at gold ran out, and, also like most mining towns, it counts for a good deal of its income on the tourist trade. In order to keep this tourist trade coming, the place is kept as quaint as possible, the names of the stores, bars an restaurants do all they can to conjure up associations with bygone days, and a good deal of time and thought is given to creating festivals and other special events timed to keep producing as many return visits as possible. The narrator of the story is a small burglar named Joe Acton who, discouraged by his time in jail, has decided to opt for a lifestyle which doesn’t perpetually risk incarceration. He comes to Julian because that’s where a job washing dishes in a restaurant has been arranged for him, and he settles in one of a cluster of decrepit little cabins in “Sleepy Hollow” because that’s the place the proprietor of the restaurant wants him to live because he’s made a payment arrangement with the place. Acton’s neighbors and fellow cabin dwellers are all inhabitants of the holes in society’s safety net, the bulk of them being alcoholic or mentally malfunctioning in some other crippling fashion, but they are not all that bad a lot. Some can be a little irritating, such as the married dopester in a nearby cabin who sometimes spends nearly the entire night noisily whacking with maddeningly regular blows of his miner’s hammer at rocks he’s gathered up or just found waiting for him. His idea is to see if they have gold hidden within them. Of course it goes without saying that they do not. Some of them are extremely likable sorts, such as Blind Ben, whose cabin is open to all comers whether he’s there or not. Ben and a good many of his visitors are musically inclined, if eccentrically so, and indulge themselves in long, amiable sessions. Now and then, Ben straps a pack on his back and goes off on a hike in the woodsy mountains all by himself, feeling his way along the nature trails. Not too long before Acton’s arrival, this bucolic peacefulness was gruesomely disturbed by the mutilation murder of a woman on a full moon night, and not too long after he’s settled into Julian, another woman is also horribly and violently killed, also on a full moon night. Now, of course, you and I instantly make the connection, but the folk of Julian, like those in any number of those dear old black and white pictures out of Universal, seem to be a little slow on the uptake. There is only one among them, an eccentric fellow named Cyrus “Moondog” Nygerski,who writes occasional columns for a couple of the small local weekly papers, who is aware of the obvious explanation, but when he writes an article which advances the theory that a werewolf is probably responsible, he sets the townfolk into an uproar, mainly because they’re afraid it might discourage their beloved tourism along the lines of Jaws, and he gets the interested attention of the local law authorities firmly fixed on him and his doings. By now Acton is part-timing at the more respectable of the town’s papers, the Julian Nugget, which is edited by the profoundly unhappily married Erik Gunn, and has become chums with Moondog. The two of them form a perfectly acceptable Holmes and Watson team – Acton is a nonbeliever in werewolves and therefore obviously the Watson – and they and the reader attempt to guess which of the odd and eccentric souls of Julian is, knowingly or unknowingly, the werewolf. The suspense builds; there are enjoyably scary scenes, particularly one routine with a bunch of ninnies who decide to go on a group cross-country bike ride in the full moonlight (I swear, some people are dense beyond belief); and in the end, the werewolf is so satisfactorily met with and dispatched that I could almost taste the buttered popcorn. Gahan Wilson is an internationally known cartoonist for the New Yorker.