Everything Under the Moon
A Novel
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- US$11.99
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- US$11.99
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A werewolf hybrid-slash-serial killer of the wicked prowls Portland’s shadows—until a sinister tech corporation hunting his kind forces him into a deadly game, awakening old ghosts and an unstoppable fury in this addictive paranormal thriller
"This is the werewolf as you haven't seen it before: talking like a Richard Kadrey novel, walking through Charlie Huston's dark streets, and snarling like a Jim Harrison creature." —Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels
Born in Missouri more than a century ago and raised in a Pentecostal orphanage, the creature now calling himself Gelson Verber has changed his name countless times. He’s part-werewolf, and makes his living hunting certain kinds of bad men—criminals, rapists, thugs—in an often grotesque parody of the natural order. Verber is clearly suffering from the kinds of things a werewolf would be uniquely vulnerable to in the modern world: the horror of war, drug abuse, and isolation in the rain-drenched environment of Portland, Oregon. He has PTSD, but in a unique way, often flashing back to his time with a regiment in World War II.
His smooth life as a serial killer takes a turn when he falls into the crosshairs of Salt Street, a development corporation running pirated criminology software and Big Data sieves to identify werewolf hybrids, who are then forced into servitude. As he falls deeper into the trap that has been set for him, his introduction to its evil architect triggers within Verber a string of recollections, conversations with the late werewolf-hybrid, John Jack Bridger. Salt Street's trap is masterful, but it does have one terrible flaw: you cannot cage someone—or something—like Gelson Verber.
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Johnson's debut novel has a few interesting moments, but is largely another by-the-numbers mashup of gritty urban fantasy and noir, replete with clich s and stereotypes. The werewolf blood in Gelson Verber's veins sharpens his senses and makes him strong and fast, but also makes him unstable. He hunts down rich rapists and fences their goods to a fence named Lemont, a pure stock character. When Gelson's latest victim turns out to have been a setup, he's forced to work for a mysterious fellow werewolf named Cristophe and his assistant, Linda. Their assignment leads to a complicated but uninteresting plot involving a rich computer genius and his slate of transgender lovers (Gelson usually uses the proper pronouns but also throws in words like "ladyboy"). There's little here that hasn't been done better elsewhere, but readers who care more about a high body count and assorted betrayals than an interesting take on werewolves will find what they're looking for here.
