Book Review: Wolves

Title: Wolves (I Bring the Fire, volume 1)

Author: C. Gockel

Date: 2017

Publisher: cgockelwrites.com

Quote:  "Fenrir isn't precisely friendly, especially not towards males."

Amy Lewis, 24-year-old veterinary student, travels with an animal some of her classmates identified as a large rodent. Taking a good look at the animal rather than just judging it, Amy recognizes it as a young female canine, wolf or wolfish dog, and calls it Fenrir. It's too little to do much damage, though, when Amy crawls out of her wrecked car to face the serial murderer who's stalking her through the dark, mean streets of Chicago.

But, because this is an urban fantasy romance, enter the Norse god Loki. He's not yet looking for love; he's looking for his ex-wife and their sons. Amy is his type, but the romance between them stays chaste and sweet...because this is volume one of a series where the adventures move too fast to leave the characters much time for romancing, and because the writer/publisher knows that wanting to see exactly how Loki would propose to a mortal woman will keep some readers interested in all of the novels and spin-off short stories, in sequence if possible.

Remembering the Eddas and Sagas in precise detail is not essential to understanding this story--Gockel has fun with the original storyline, anyway--but it will help. Norse lore seems to have spliced family legends into philosophical myths. The different ancestral families were sometimes friends with each other, sometimes enemies, both before and after peace was sealed--for one lifetime, at least--by the official weddings of young people who might or might not have been "in love" with other people. Loki, the rebellious son who came to embody the spirits of rebellion and mischief and chaos, was married in some stories. The stories that sound more like family history gave him a bland longsuffering wife, Sigyn, and two children. The stories that sound more like mythology married him to Angerboda, which means what it sounds like, and made them the parents of Fenris Ulf, a vicious wolf, and Hel, the queen of the underworld. For those who sympathize with Loki it's possible to imagine that his "goddess" wife might more properly have been called Anganboda, the foreboding or bringer of joy, rather than anger; Loki might have said that his pranks were meant to bring joy and mirth.

In this remake, Loki lost his first wife Aggie and daughter Helen long ago, got over them, and is still on speaking terms with his ex-wife Sigyn, speaking to her mainly about their sons. He's looking for them when he finds Amy. Though he last visited our world in Amy's grandfather's time, he knows a scumbag when he smells one, and his thoughts alone are enough to kill the murderer and set fire to the photos the nasty creep is carrying around (of other people he's killed). Amy immediately demonstrates that she really is Loki's type by stamping out the fire, saying that those people's families may want the photos. 

Now she owes him. Now she has to take him home to meet her dear old Ukrainian-American grandmother. Actually the grandmother happens to have a rental apartment Loki can use. That's not all he'll ask of them, though. He will take more, of course, but what he's asking Amy and her grandmother for in this novel is to go with him to the Light Elves' world. The Light Elves like humans--too much to suit Odin, who banished them from our world for that reason, as you might or might not have remembered--and they all genuinely enjoy Amy's grandmother's story of escaping from her "Communist-occupied" country in the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, the rest of the adventure is not so sweet.

Amy set out to see her grandmother, like Little Red Riding Hood, and met a predator, a "wolf" of the worst kind. Her own little pet, and Fenris Ulf himself--here Loki's subconscious mind and powers, a deadly force that sometimes assumes but is in no way confined to the form of a moral wolf--continue to interact and shape the story after the kind of "wolf" that needs killing is good and dead. If you like big wolfish dogs behaving well, you will enjoy this story.

The e-copy I received is not amenable to pagination, but Wolves is a short novel, not a mere novella or novelette. If you enjoy chortling at the odd mash-up of Chicago and Asgard, this book will keep you chortling through hours of commute and wait time.

If this review were being written by the sort of lower-case-t twits currently running Twitter, it would end with something like "Oh dear, oh dear! This novel is likely to encourage young women who are attracted to 'bad boys' to befriend or even date guys who bring stolen goods into their houses! It might influence people to do bad things! It must be censored!" 

Since this is, instead, a libertarian feminist web site, I'll say it in French: Pouf!