I received a free ebook copy of this book from NetGallery, on behalf of the publisher. This book will be published on May 7, 2013.
Benjamin Percy’s Red Moon can be read as a thriller, in which lycanthropy exists as a prion infection. It can be read as an alternate history, because the disease lead to the creation of a country just for the infected between Finland and Russia. But I think the best way to read it is as a work of social commentary. Lycanthropy has turned the infected into a cross between second class citizens and suspected terrorists. Their existence makes everyone edgy and fearful, infected or otherwise. Red Moon give you a lot to think about.
Red Moon opens with a terrorist attack. Three lycans attack the passengers and crew of three different planes. Only one person, Patrick, survives. In my reading, Patrick is our everyman character. He gets to see the divide between infected and healthy from a lot of different angles, changing his mind as he goes. Another narrator, the infected daughter of former lycan advocates, shows us what life is like if you’re infected but don’t want to take the side-effect heavy mandated drugs. Yet another narrator, a politician named Chase, shows us the insider perspective on the government response to the attacks and lycanthropy in general.
The narrators and minor characters cross each others’ paths from time to time, but they don’t link up the way that I’ve come to expect. Rather, Percy bounces between his characters to give us a fairly complete picture of an American society with serious divisions. It wouldn’t be hard to read it as a satire. But while it gives you a lot to think about as you go, Red Moon is a messy read. It’s hard to get a grip on where it’s going. Many of the villains are undeveloped, though the protagonists are interesting and well-rounded. The plot zigs and zags around a lot, and jumps back in forth in time.
What I liked most about this book is that it’s not the usual thing. Percy brought back a lot of the scariness into werewolf stories. Thankfully, no one strips off their shirt for no reason. But I feel as though this book tries to tackle to many things, and doesn’t quite achieve all its objectives. It’s not a bad book, by any means, but it could have used some more organization.