Let me get all the cute stuff out of the way first. About how I want to howl at the moon over this book, and that I devoured these pages, and how the change Anne Rice has made since her recent fiction, a pair of sentimental novels based on the material of the Gospels, seems almost lycanthropic. As it happens, in her terrific new novel, “The Wolf Gift,’’ Rice’s version of the werewolf legend pretty much leaves the moon out of it.
Her main character, Reuben Golding, a tall, handsome young San Francisco journalist with a trust fund, instructs us in these matters. While on assignment in Mendocino County to write a feature story about a huge estate that’s just come on the market (which includes a mansion overlooking the Pacific and hundreds of acres of woods), Reuben is attacked by what he later, in a news story, dubs a “Man Wolf.’’ For reasons that quickly become clear the creature bites him but does not kill him, thus bestowing on him what Rice calls “the wolf gift’’ or the “Chrism,’’ a sort of Faustian bargain that allows him to use his transformation for good, setting him on a path, sometimes at great cost and danger, toward a new and profound understanding of himself in relation to nature and culture.
