As a perpetual reminder in my book review posts, buy off of bookshop.org or your local bookstore! Amazon sucks ass for writers.
At work one morning, the internet cut out. And stayed cut out for several hours. So I decided to look through my ebook library for something I hadn’t already read, and came across Ego Homini Lupus by Gretchen Felker-Martin.
I learned a fair bit of French, plus as a writer you pick up certain things of Latin, so I knew ego was the self, homini was human, and lupus is wolf. I never googled the direct translation, but I went into it thinking it might be some sort of werewolf tale.
It technically has something that could be something resembling a werewolf. But overall, I was wrong.
I don’t often read period pieces, and Ego Homini Lupus is set in 12th century what-is-now England. As with many period pieces, the writing was dense, but I enjoyed the glimpse into the time and the world. I know little about history, and littler of that time frame, so I cannot speak to its historical accuracy with the leaders and wars going on, but it felt genuine.
Aside from finding the worldbuilding (can period pieces use that term?) fascinating, unfortunately, I cannot say many other positive things about the book. Admittedly, toward the end I was hatereading it just to finish it. The ending was cathartic in many ways, at least.
The setting and premise were dark. Not dark for the sake of being edgy or gritty, thankfully, but genuinely dismal: the three-ish main characters hated each other, there was regularly violence, and life was abysmal for everyone involved. And that was before the war and the monster.
The horror motifs, usually in nightmares but later on in visions, hallucinations, and at the very end, reality, were well-done and not the same things fantasy usually utilizes, whether in theme or word choice.
The main-est character, Joan, is wedded to a semi-fallen knight, and ends up having to work herself to the bone to manage his tiny household. A large part of this involves skinning and curing the hides of the wolves he hunts to pay taxes to the king, so a lot of the horror imagery centers around wolves and skins.
It is gradually—and I mean glacially gradually—revealed that the secret her new husband and sister-in-law are keeping is the form of a giant beast, vaguely described but definitely foul and furred and perhaps wolf-like, which both provides for and hates them. There are arcane, witch-like magics involved, which Joan slowly learns herself, and that was a nice narrative blooming.
But the setting and the character arcs are so dismal, hopeless, and painful that the ending, in which she and her stepdaughter sort of leash that power for themselves is late in coming and mostly told from others’ point of views. Revenge is taken, brutally and wholly, including against her pathetic husband and her rapist. But we only get the action form of the catharsis; there is little emotional catharsis, as addled as Joan’s perspective is.
The novel did not shy from anything, whether the grotesque horror, the dismal living conditions, or the violence of war and marriage and motherhood. Most of the significant characters were female, too, contrasting different archetypes and playing off of each other in both frustrating and gratifying ways. But there were so few light points amongst all of the dark, it was a slog to get through.
If you like period pieces with a touch of horror and a firm handshake with the grotesque, this could be a novel for you. But I don’t think it was a novel for me.
