#wolf tools

Disclaimer: there are many stories out there that lie on the fringes of “werewolf”—especially when we emerge into monster stories of other cultures. The lines can blur, but I’m not really here to have the argument of “could you classify a skinwalker as a form of werewolf?”. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. That’s not what wolf tools are built for.

My focus is on the tools, how designing a werewolf with certain traits or details can shape a narrative’s tone, and how these stories reflect the wider world they exist within.

All that said, let’s dive in:

The Moon

The Moon represents the act of transformation. Despite the name of this tool, not all werewolves transform by the light of the full moon. Mostly, it sounds poetic.

Common questions that the moon asks of a werewolf story:

What causes the act of transformation?

How much control does the werewolf have over this act?

What is the physical process of transforming? How is it described? How is it shown to the audience?

The Beast

“the beast” represents the actual, physical, monstrous form of the werewolf. If the Moon is the initiation and process of transforming, the beast is the end result. Depending on the story’s greater purpose and the era of generation, you’ll see some interesting variations here.

What does the beast look like? How lupine is it?

What is the mind of the monster? How much conscious control does the human within have?

The Bite

The bite concerns itself with transmission. It’s a more common trope among monsters—we see bites among vampires, among zombies—and it lends a certain universality to their horror. Not only is this thing terrifying… but you could be, too.

With werewolves, the Bite broadens beyond a physical, disease-like “transmission”, and in certain cases, there is overlap between the Bite and the Moon (where a transmission or bestowing of Werewolf-ism immediately triggers a transformation. We see this a lot in curse stories)

What causes transmission?

Typically the answers to this question fall into three main categories:

Physical interaction (eg a bite, scratch, lovemaking, exchange of blood or saliva)

Birth (born to a werewolf parent)

Magic (placed under a curse, given a magical ring)

The Bane

The Bane encompasses the werewolf’s weakness. What renders a werewolf vulnerable? In some cases, this may be what makes it killable, what pierces its thick hide; in other cases, this is a question of what forces, or hinders a transformation.

What is the material, object, location, or action, that triggers the weakness?

How does it affect the wolf?

The World

Finally! Last but not least, this is a broad category that explores how the werewolf navigates the world, how the world perceives the wolf, and the general back and forth relationship between the monster and its surroundings.

How easy is it for the wolf to navigate in the world?

How much of the world knows of the werewolf’s existence?

What is the world’s opinion of the wolf

How intertwined is the wolf’s story and experience with the structure of the wider world?

1. What the Hell is Nightbitch about, actually?

Nightbitch is the story of a mother who finds herself turning into a dog. It’s the story of a neurotic, hypochondriac mother with a difficult child and a largely absent father, struggling to get by. It’s the story of a mother, struggling with her female identity, with leaving her career, with finding a meaningful connection to another woman. It’s a story with monster women, dogs that smell of strawberries, multi-level-marketing schemes, and a Lot of dead rabbits.

Does that make any sense? No? Wonderful. Now you understand Nightbitch.

Nightbitch is not a perfect book, and it is certainly not a book for everyone. It’s a bizarre piece of literary fiction, that can lean cerebral and overwhelming, but it is damn good at what it’s doing. And it’s a werewolf book that’s well worth our time to discuss.

[additional disclaimer: I did listen to Nightbitch as an audiobook. I wish I had scribed down lines, to provide you with some reciepts for everything I talk about below. Learning for next time.]

2. Nightbitch as a werewolf novel

Before we get to deep into the details, I want to establish that Nightbitch is a novel that does not explain itself. It takes deliberate strides to its own imprecision. Things happen, and our main character changes and grows and experiences her metamorphosis, but none of it—not what happens to her, or why, or How—ever gets explained.

I also want to establish that Yes, Nightbitch turns itno a dog. Yes, it is still a werewolf story. It is anything but a stereotypical werewolf story, but it still follows the narrative and can still be analyzed with Wolf Tools. (and what is a dog but a domestic wolf; what is a mother if not domestic?)

What you’ll see below is a description of how Nightbitch approaches each of the wolf tools, and a little commentary on the approach: what's effective, where we've seen this before, all that jazz.

the Moon:

Nighbitch’s transformation is by far my favorite piece of Yoder’s take on the werewolf. Especially in the beginning, Nightbitch (the mother) undergoes a slow, uncanny transformation, with symptoms that walk the line between medical nightmare and supernatural. Thick hair grows on the back of her neck, a cist full of hair appears at the small of her back (a tail?), her teeth sharpen strangely, she grows six sets of nipples. These early aspects of transformation are strange and terrifying and would absolutely be the sort of thing to send an exhausted hypochondriac into a state of hysteria. And they last weeks.

I've found it common enough for werewolf stories (especially modern literature and films) to more thoroughly explore the middle-stages of a transformation, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one at such a timescale.

But when she actually transforms fully into a dog— all that literary detail disappears. Nightbitch is nothing more than a sensory lens of the world around her. The transformation is lightning quick, dream-like, unelaborated upon and unexplained.

It’s a clever move on Yoder’s part, the drawn-out focus on every sign and symptom, followed by the absolute absence of detail to follow. In embracing the transformation, Nightbitch abandons fear and embraces instinct. Her incessant internal monologue shuts up, and we, the readers, listen to that Glorious Quiet alongside her.

What drives this transformation, and those that follow? Yoder never explicitly tells us. There are distinct emotional notes, a need to release, but the exact cause is entirely speculative.

The Beast:

When the entended metamorphosis ends and she embraces the change, she turns into a dog. At first glance, Nightbitch’s Beast seems simple enough.

But the book doesn’t stop there.

No, post first-transformation, Nightbitch begins to explore what means to be a Dog—not just in Body, but in spirit. It affects how she orders food, how she treats her baby, and ultimately shapes her final artistic moment of self-actualization as woman and dog, a powerful, wild thing.

While it’s not common, it isn’t unheard of for a Beast to reflect in behavior and thought more than in physical manifestation (we see this idea first manifest around the turn of the 20th century, and the dawn of Freudian psychology).

The Bite:

Once again, we don’t ever get a real answer for this. Neither does Nightbitch, so we’re all in the same boat.

Our best answer comes from “A Field Guide to Magical Women”, by one Wanda White (a professor from a long-defunct university with no trackable identity). This field guide covers a whole smorgasbord of different magical women (including but not limited to the delightful bird women of Peru).

For certain magical women, assuming their magical selves is something of a second puberty or a menopause, a natural transition stage into a second, unexplored life. There’s no rhyme or reason to it beyond that.

We meet Nightbitch in a difficult, stagnant position of life, and her transformation and assumption of the Dog as a piece of herself catalyzes and forces her from that stagnancy. But is it the stagnancy that invites the first transformation? That’s up to speculation. If I were to make my own assumption, I think the onset of the dog is a sort of epiphany, or magical psychotic break. The stress of an unsupported motherhood and her social isolation drives Nightbitch’s body to act on its own accord to get her to Move and Break the Pattern.

The Bane

Nightbitch doesn’t have a Bane, at least not in a meaningful way.

However, the narrative Yoder has crafted doesn’t need one.

Banes are useful in stories where the werewolf needs to be fought and defeated. They’re a literary McGuffin that finds use in horror, fantasy, thriller, stories where the monster’s death is necessary.

Nightbitch is a literature piece about a mother finding agency through the wild thing within. Her (Nightbitch’s) arc isn’t one of defeat and of death; it’s an arc of victory and growth.

Besides, our protagonist does enough to be her own worst enemy. There’s nothing a silver bullet could do that she couldn’t talk and obsess and Google herself into.

The World

Nightbitch exists in a (widely) Wolf-Unknowning, wolf-neutral world, meaning:

Most people don’t have the slightest clue that some women may turn into dogs upon reaching middle age

As such, there’s not much of a public opinion on such women

There is an implied knowledge by a niche few (Wanda White), who views magical women with academic respect and wonder.

At the end of Nightbitch, The Nightbitch brings her monsterhood into the world through a trippy, MLM(?) drug-induced act of performative art, thereby bringing the werewolf (dog woman) into the public sphere. Still, even then, there’s a public uncertainty to the nature of the monster. It’s difficult to draw the line between art and reality, between strange woman in a costume and genuine magic.

It’s a line that the entire book tows, one that it never resolves, and expanding that unknowing out of the narrator’s own mind and Into the wider public sphere almost illustrates Nightbitch’s own resolution into her own magic, which she, mastering her mystery, can now externalize.

This is also a Light building world, meaning that the world looks very much like it does for most people, wolf or no wolf (dog or no dog). The exterior world has not been tailored specifically for (or against) the existence of werewolves. (If you’re looking for a good example of a heavy-built world for contrast, see Mongrels by Steven Graham Jones—where everything, from French fries to pants, has a direct impact on the lives of werewolves)

In short, no one knows what the hell Nightbitch is, not even Nightbitch (but she still rocks it).

Tools Summary:

Yoder places a lot of narrative empasis on the Moon, more than any other Wolf Tool. The rest of the tools have their place (except Bane), but Yoder engages the Moon with a level of detail and focus that truly stands out.

Relative to other werewolf stories, it isn't that Yoder's Moon is That Much Stronger*, but more significantly, it's that the other Tools are dampened and blurred (but not simplified--no no, Yoder does not fall onto classic tropes). Blurring the other tools heightens the impact of Nightbitch's transformation, and it brings the reader much closer into Nightbitch's POV. She has no clue what's happening to her, or why, or what any of this means, but she can look at the changes in her body, and feel the shift in her mannerisms... and we, the readers, are stuck in the same, tiny, baby-vomit scented rowboat as her.

*what I mean by "not much stronger": it's super duper common in horror, especially horror films, to place emphasis on the physical aspects of transformation. The gory, bone-snapping, fur-sprouting special effects lend the werewolf most of its horror, and it's repulsion. It's also really easy to emphasize visual horror in visual media (film) (see: An American Werewolf in London's loooong transformation sequence)

Nightbitch, in placing its emphasis on that same lengthy transformation in the beginning, heightens the already present horror in motherhood (and more generally, womanhood). In suburban midwest america for a decently well-off mother, there's little scarier than the weird growth on your arm.

(or there's plenty scarier-- is your spouse having an affair? is your kid going to die if you look away for too long? are you ever going to regain the sense of freedom you had in youth? Will the other PTA moms accept you as one of their kith and kin? A weird growth is a much easier thing to be afraid of).

BUT!

(but!)

Once Nightbitch transforms, the script is flipped. She gains this feral ease, a strength and acceptance in her wildness, a faith in herself that she did not previously have... and would you guess? the lengthy, horror-style descriptions of her transformations disappear entirely.

Nightbitch becomes a Werewolf Protagonist, not just a Werewolf Victim. She takes her monsterhood--and her life into her own hands. When she transforms in this latter section of the book, it is described in action and motion - how she moves around the park, how she kills rabbits and sniffs around the homeless camp at night. There's very little in the way of sprouting claws and jutting jaws, very little of that material of fear, because Nightbitch Is No Longer Afraid.*

*she does have her lapses (see the dead cat).

All this rambling to say:

When Yoder emphasizes the details of the transformation, the book reads as horror, and you feel the horror.

When Yoder cuts the transformation details, the book steps out of horror and enters Nightbitch's mom literature arc of personal growth.

The Moon (or lack of clear moon) is not the only narrative element contributing to this, but this use of the Moon is a clever way to emphasize tone (and tonal shifts) in narrative.

Questions to mull on:

In what other ways could you manipulate or change the level of focus on the Moon mid-narrative to affect tone?

how might focus on Moon change with different POV?

What if Yoder had continued to emphasize a more visceral, gory transformation through the rest of the book? How would that change Nightbitch's character, and the overall tone of the story?