Books Discussed in this Essay:

Bitten
by Kelley Armstrong
Random House (2001), 576 pp.

Stolen
by Kelley Armstrong
Random House (2003), 576 pp.

Frostbitten
by Kelley Armstrong
Random House (2009), 352 pp.

Of all the supernatural beings that have haunted humanity through the ages — wizards, witches, zombies, vampires, ghosts — the werewolf is perhaps the most unlikely candidate for popular resurrection. It has no tragic, romantic ancestor like Dracula, whose descendants have been idealized of late in pop culture phenomena like Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. Nor does it recall a cheery, relatable figure along the lines of a Harry Potter, whose adventures have elevated the wizard to Beatle-like status among children and adults alike.

In European folklore, werewolves were lurking figures, half-man/half-beast, fanged and clawed killers of livestock and the occasional human. The overbearing moralism of such fables has led us to see the creatures mainly as villains in cautionary tales for children — keeping them out of the forest and safely in bed after nightfall, when the moon drives the werewolf through his ungodly “Change.” But in the past decade, a Canadian named Kelley Armstrong has taken this frightening, even pathetic figure and made it surprisingly au courant.

In a bestselling series of books with terse titles like Bitten, Stolen, Broken, and, most recently, this fall’s Frostbitten (set in Alaska), Armstrong posits that werewolves are alive and well, albeit living in relative seclusion in upstate New York. They hold jobs, use cellphones, and have gym memberships. The books are the kind of mass-market fiction you see people reading without dust jackets on the subway, unable to suppress a telltale grin. Like Stephen King, who manages an under-the-covers, flashlight-in-face kind of storytelling without sounding ridiculous, Armstrong not only writes interesting page-turners, she has also achieved that unlikely goal, what all writers strive for: a genre of her own.

Bitten, her first novel, was published in 2001 and set the groundwork for much of what has become the eleven-book Otherworld series. (Armstrong’s oeuvre spans a cast of currently chic supernatural characters — Dime Store Magic, one of her best-known titles, is about witches, and her new, wildly successful series of young adult novels features a necromancer named Chloe — but the werewolf is still its throbbing, bloody heart.) As the story opens, thirty-year-old Elena Michaels is making her way through the streets of Toronto, looking for a place to Change. Cities aren’t amenable to mythical beasts, though, and as Elena pokes behind trash bins and half-heartedly stalks petty criminals she exudes something of the frustration many of us might feel at the intersection of Bay and Bloor, pressed to find a water fountain or a place to pee. “These city backstreets are too confining,” she notes. “If I want to run, I must go to the ravine.”

The appeal of Armstrong’s novels, which have appeared on the bestseller lists of both the New York Times and Globe and Mail, lies as much in their hands-on evocation of werewolf life as in their theoretical content. This is not The Call of the Wild ; it’s Nora Roberts meets The Sopranos by way of Henry David Thoreau. Armstrong has mined the best features of airport fiction for storylines with enough sex to appease a romance reader, and enough violence to satisfy a thriller fan. But she has also introduced ideas to keep a non–fantasy fan engaged. It is almost as if Armstrong, who lives in rural Ontario, is on a quest to revive the ideals of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher most associated with an optimistic vision of a socialized state of nature. Rousseau held that, free of our civilization’s oppressive influences, humans might stoop to violence but would live within a system of mostly self-governing checks and balances, and thus know a more authentic experience as human beings. Armstrong’s creatures live the lives of wealthy characters in a small-town soap opera, with a taste for skinny-dipping and tiny forest critters. Whenever a stranger comes to the edge of the property and issues a challenge, one of them just “takes care of things.”

In many ways, Armstrong is distilling an aspirational fantasy of contemporary life. These werewolves have it all: They hold great jobs as renowned anthropologists, translators, or artists with New York gallery representation. They live in sprawling estates with Food Network pantries and drive Porsches and Mercedes. In a representative passage, in which the Pack gathers in the leader’s study to sip Scotch by the fireplace or pick up Il Corriere della Sera, Milan’s daily newspaper, werewolves come across a bit like a North American’s idealized concept of Europeans: suave and passionate, yet simultaneously genteel. Such vignettes also suggest that what we really want nowadays is to live the highly commercial existence of contemporary success without abandoning our sense of innate wildness.

When you think about what aspect of human psychology might have led to the werewolf myth, there are many conditions to which an involuntary change might speak: the lunatic, the disabled person, the serial killer. In Armstrong’s conception, the painful transformation from human to wolf occurs not just once a month, as some legends have it, but every few days. By normalizing the Change in this way, she takes the central dilemma of the werewolf’s existence and puts it somewhere in line with a backache or a migraine; it’s inconvenient, but not so distant from the realm of human experience that readers cannot relate. In doing so, she also springs the werewolf from the chains of our long-standing collective imagination — the monster lurking in the forest, the Other — and places it at the centre of a highly topical discussion about how to recapture those elemental aspects of our nature that modern life, for all its benefits, has crowded out.

In 1951, J. D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye, a book that has become synonymous with the alienation produced by modern life. Holden Caulfield, kicked out of boarding school, wanders his former stomping grounds of upper-crust Manhattan, commenting on the mores and hypocrisies of class. Subsequent shifts in the literary canon — following from social shifts in the politics of race, gender, and sexuality — suggest that the establishment has come to value fiction that speaks to experiences of otherness and alienation. University classes are stocked with books like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man — books that articulate experiences of division and injustice, and make the prism of identity one of the most valuable lenses for viewing a text.