Our main character is now Marty Coslaw (whose last name I will never get over) a wheelchair bound pre-pubescent who really has a darkly sadistic side, more on that later. It’s become something of a cult classic and was the perfect fodder for those pre-teen late night slumber parties huddled up together under your blanket fort.

Where the book had an almost grotesque feel to it, the movie goes full out 80s B-movie horror, and to great effect I might add. The movie adaptation of the book takes almost a 360 in terms of tone and atmosphere from the book. Stephen King’s Silver Bullet (major spoilers here because, boy, do we have a lot to talk about) In general, it’s a short but fun little novella that doesn’t break any boundaries but tells a solid gothic horror story nonetheless. They complement the story beautifully and can tell the entire story almost on their own. It’s really illustrator Bernie Wrightson’s gorgeous drawings that help bring the story to life. The story itself is a pretty basic werewolf tale with a few notable twists. The plot doesn’t really start until around July and even then it doesn’t bring some relevant characters back together until the last chapter December. Instead it focuses on the events of the month from the point of view of various townspeople.

There aren’t any real main characters in the book.

The chapter format of the book was in part because it was originally supposed to be a calendar, but King found the format too constraining for his storytelling style and it was expanded into a novella. The Cycle of the Werewolf is unique in King’s repertoire in that it was released as a fully illustrated short novel with each month of the year being a chapter in the story of a werewolf terrorizing the fictional town of Tarker’s Mills, Maine. Whether that was internal or not remains to be seen. Stephen King’s Silver Bullet, based loosely on King’s novella The Cycle of the Werewolf, may be one of the more hilariously entertaining deviations from its source material. There’s quite a few Stephen King movie adaptations that bear little resemblance to the books they’re based on.

Cycle of the werewolf a novel