Rating: 
Summary: Howling at the Moon
Review: This is a superior collection of stories to Chabon's earlier "Model World". While the first half of that collection all seemed like carbon copies of each other, "Werewolves"--though each story centers around a marriage that has either fallen apart or is in the process of falling apart--has enough variety that reading all the stories back-to-back does not become tedious."Son of the Wolfman", where a woman who has been having trouble conceiving with her husband is raped and impreganated by another man, is the most memorable story because of the issues it deals with. All the other stories are good as well--I won't go into describing each and every one. "The Black Mill" is an interesting little horror yarn, but it's pretty tame by today's standards. I'd suggest Chabon stick with the genre he knows best. There's not a lot to pick on with this collection of stories. The writing is flawless, the characters are all unique oddballs, and the stories are all interesting. One thing I grew tired of was the constant description of what every room looks like and every person is wearing. A lot of description can add to the atmosphere of the scene and such, but going into what everyone is wearing is irrelevant and becomes tedious after a while. Anyway, "Werewolves" is howlingly good collection of stories (thank you, I'll be here all week) that I would recommend over "Model World". But I still prefer his novels.
Rating:
Summary: Sneaking up on Nabokov
Review: This is the better of Chabon's two short story collections. There isn't a lot of thematic variation here - all of these stories except for the very last one are about the muddles and unpredictabilities attendant upon married life, and reading them quickly one after the other can be a bit of a downer for this reason. But Chabon has an incredible gift with language, and although a lot of his characters are losers or muddleheaded or the victims of terrible decisions, his prose makes the world around them seem so rich and pregnant with possibilities that it's difficult to find any of the yarns here too depressing. The only time he misfires is in one story that's set entirely in a neighborhood bar - Chabon clearly doesn't frequent such places, and his attempt to catch the atmosphere in one is condescending and a little cliched. The last story, "In The Black Mill," was a special treat for me. I'm a big fan of gothic horror and this is a wonderful pastiche of M.R. James with maybe a touch of Poe. One hopes that the author never gets so soaked up in Northeastern literary culture that he begins to think that this sort of genre exercise is beneath his dignity.
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