Curse of the Wendigo – Monstrumologist #2

The Curse of the Wendigo

(Monstrumologist #2)

by Rick Yancey

Simon & Schuster, 2011

464 Pages

Young Adult

For Dr. Warthrop and Will Henry, the curse begins when an old friend shows up at the Monstrumologist’s home with a request: to find her husband, John Chanler, who has disappeared in the deep Canadian wilderness while on a quest to find a creature Dr. Warthrop swears is just a myth. But Chanler was a good and close friend once. And Muriel was once a love of Warthrop’s… until he lost her to Chanler. So the Monstrumologist and his assistant travel North from Rat Portage, a gold rush town where Chanler was last seen.

Yancey is always original. Though exploring a classic monster in this book, there are not too many stories about the Wendigo, save those Lovecraftian tales of Ithaqua, and of course, the second episode of Supernatural, which coincidentally I saw whilst reading this book.

Deep in the snowy waste, they find Chanler’s guide impaled on a tree. They choose to bury his body; something that for some reason upsets the local tribe of First Nations people, who then refuse to help the party search for Professor Chanler. But Warthrop and Will Henry continue on with only their guide, a mounted police officer and a fan of the Monstrumologist, Sergeant Hawk. They eventually find Chanler, next to dead, dehydrated, and suffering from exposure. Then they get lost in the endless woods.

They begin to see eyes following them. Sergeant Hawk goes a little crazy and runs away, but they find him again soon… at the very top of a very tall tree, facing outward. Dead. On their journey back, Warthrop insists on taking responsibility for carrying the near-comatose Professor Chanler, who, every once in a while, seems to come out of his delirium; one time, just enough to take a bite out of Will Henry’s chest.

Both Pellinore Warthrop and his indispensable assistant William Henry James learn about their relationship with one another and perhaps more importantly, themselves while alone in the snowy white void. Once, Warthrop loses his composure and screams at Will Henry. But Will is forgiving, as he has seen into his mentor’s soul. Later, he will see deeper than he ever imagined.

The wilderness and the slum were but two faces of the same desolation. The grey land of soul-crushing nothingness in the slum was as bereft of hope as the burned-out snow-packed brûlé of the forest.

 
We then see the opposite end of the spectrum, moving from full wilderness to the dense city of New York for the Monstrumologists’ convention in order to challenge Abram von Helrung, once Pellinore’s mentor, on the inclusion of mythical creatures such as Lepto Lurconis, the Wendigo, into the Catalogue of Aberrant Species.

In the cellars below the convention lies the Monstrumarium, or “The Beastie Bin,” where both preserved and live specimens are kept for examination and research. An irresistible place for young monster hunters to explore. And so, one Miss Lillian Trumbul Bates, none other than von Helrung’s neice, plays a little joke on poor Will Henry… who ends up being bitten, again, this time by a Mongolian Death Worm.

A word of advice, Will Henry. When a person of the female gender says she wants to show you something, run the other way. The odds are it is not something you wish to see.

 
Oh stop. I know what you are thinking. Joseph Delaney has been called misogynistic because of the words of his character, the Spook. Utter nonsense. His Last Apprentice series has some of the strongest female leads of any book I have read. You don’t say the writers of All in the Family are bigoted because their character Archie Bunker is. Likewise, Pelinore Warthrop is a wounded man. You need to read this story to fully understand what he has been through, and though you may not agree with his choices, you will see why he would say something like this. It reveals much about a character that is so introverted.

In fact, this book is much more about exploring what drives a man like Pellinore Warthrop to chase monsters. It delves into his love for both Chanler and Muriel, his guilt and his passion. The Monstrumologist is Manic. He is rude and self-absorbed. If he does not know how to hold up his end of a proper relationship, perhaps it is because he has never seen one. And what does that portend for Will Henry?

Pelinore and Muriel revisit their feelings for each other as Chanler, sinking deeper into his malady, escapes from Bellevue Hospital, killing Skala the burly bodyguard who had been assigned to watch over him… and to stab him with a silver dagger through the heart should anything happen.

The possessed Chanler likes to take eyes and cut off faces. As soon as he escapes, he makes a slaughterhouse of the Fifth Avenue Chanler mansion, and kidnaps Muriel. Here we see the celebration of gore that is Yancey’s hallmark.

Life is…

 
Chanler leads a whole team of Monstrumologists on a wild goose chase through the streets of New York, leaving piles of dead in his wake. One night Will Henry hears the voice of the Wendigo calling his name, and would have followed to his doom, were it not for the Doctor pulling him back from an open window.

And yet, Warthrop still swears there is no such thing as a Wendigo.

(Will Henry seems to heal a little too quickly considering all he’s been through and the lack of Oxycodone in the 1800s, but if I can allow myself to suspend disbelief that there are such things as anthropophagi, I can certainly allow Will Henry to be tough-as-nails.)

We never do get The Monstrumologist to admit there is a Wendigo. And Pellinore is not the one to end the reign of terror caused by Chanler’s… “condition.” He could never bring himself to do that to someone he considered a brother.

Until the breakneck ending, The Curse of the Wendigo is not the exciting adventure movie the first book gave us. It is a deeper look into the human psyche, the true meaning of what is monstrous, what love means, and what true horror is: The loss of love, a decision made in a tenement hall, and being alone in a crowd of peers.