Run Through the Heather
An Exploration of Male-Centric
Werewolf Fiction
By Leander Ransier
Introduction
Thesis Focus
Werewolf trends pre-2000's
Werewolf trends into the present
Masculinity and Pack Structure
LGBT and werewolves
Setting
Research Methodology
Results: Character Study
(Run Through the Heather, Ransier, pg. 5)
He could tell Avery by his cap, the one he wore until a teacher told him to take it off, and then after. His hands were in his pockets, another usual thing. Most of the guys he hung around did that. They all shared some similarities: caps, jeans, dirty boots, camouflage jackets, farmer dads and expecting to be farmers themselves if they didn’t go to trade school for some other career only a stone’s throw off and still in the circle of blue-collar. They were proud of it, too, even Avery in his stern quiet way. Chance envied that; they had shit on their boots and they held themselves with proud esteem while Chance lived in a trailer and wished that somehow, some way, no one knew that. Some of the guys in the group, and some in his tech-prep classes worked with his mom at the factory across town. At that point, he had expected to get a summer job there, too, but that was before the INCIDENT.� Avery leaned on the old wooden shed as Chance came over. � Chance adjusted his backpack straps, trying to keep a little cool, despite everything. “So, um, what’s up?”� “Where’d it bite you?” Avery asked with a slight tilt of the head.� “Excuse me?”� “Thing that put you in the hospital. Where’d it bite you?”� “A few places. Why?”� Avery said nothing for a moment, just letting the two of them hold eye contact until Chance looked away. After, a rush of movement drew Chance’s gaze back. Avery pulled his jacket and shirt up, revealing a nasty scar on his torso. Chance could see a trail of hair from Avery’s belly button down to the hem of his faded jeans. He swallowed.� Like that, the brown jacket came back down, like shutters.� “You too?” Chance asked in a quiet voice, almost a wheeze.
(Run Through the Heather, Ransier, pg 11)
The night he transformed, apparently a month after the INCIDENT, it started with his jaw. A sudden pain shooting through, popping it and making him grit his teeth. A sharp pain, the kind that pushed at his nerves, then rippled out to other places. His hands, his shoulders, his toes. Soon everything was bulging, pushing, his skin tight and barely able to contain the changes. A few seconds later, he was on the floor, fallen out of his chair.� When he screamed, it came out wrong, inhuman. He panted in guttural spurts as the pain died down.� He got up, bit by bit, wobbly. Chance felt too warm, slightly dizzy. Nothing was at its proper height. He looked in the mirror, and what he saw stunned him.� His hair color him from head to foot, no bare skin to be found. His clothes meanwhile hung off him in ribbons, what was left of them, anyway.� The face staring back wasn’t his, but a hellhound’s.� In horror, he lashed out a clawed hand at the lamp, making it crash and sending the room into darkness. It wasn’t dark enough. That body, that warped body...he couldn’t escape it. He could feel it around him.� His everything throbbed in dull aches. He could hear so much: the knocks in the freezer, the hum of the hallway light, raccoons nosing through the trash outside. He could smell the trash beyond the walls, and the fact that it was a raccoon. He had never smelled raccoon before. In a daze, he soon stumbled out of his room, to the sliding door, and ran down the street. In a couple of steps, he fell down onto all fours. He kept going, moving a body he didn’t know, until he reached the treeline. Chance pushed on a final time with his last burst of energy through the brush and the branches that scratched at his furred flanks. He curled up in the mix of grass and leaves just beyond, whimpering all the while. He eventually gave in to the aches and the growing fatigue, sinking into sleep.� When he woke up at dawn, he could smell the dewy earth, the smell of worms. Birds chirped above him. His back complained about sleeping on the ground all night. Mud clung to his feet as he limped back home. He didn’t bother to wonder if the previous night had been a dream.
Results: Character Study
(Run Through the Heather, Ransier, pg 16)
“Unhinged stupid hick,” Wayne uttered in a low growl.� Collin posited, “Everything else is a lot like the movies, so wouldn’t an alpha make sense, too?”� Chance looked at everyone. “Is it usually like this?”� Collin gave Chance what looked like a sad attempt at a small smile around his own muzzle. “No; we usually hunt, hang out, explore. Believe it or not we do have fun.”� “Sometimes Avery does, too,” Laurel added.� Wayne glowered further. “I doubt it.”� “I’ve seen him smile before,” Laurel retorted.� “Must’ve been a trick of the light.” Wayne was taking no prisoners. After a moment of tense quiet, he muttered, “I still think someday he’s gonna get daddy’s gun and shoot everyone up.”� Laurel frowned the best she could. “He can hear you, you know.”� “Well, good! Fuck him! He kicked Collin in the face!”� Avery did in fact hear; it was very obvious from the moment he made his way back up, and pushed Wayne to the ground. � He was soon on top of the other boy. “This what you want? Your dominance and shit? Eh?” he snarled, low and close.� “Get off,” Wayne gasped. “I can’t breathe!”� Avery didn’t let up. “Does this make me in charge? Am I King Dumbass of all you fuckwits?”� “Get off!”� “Avery!” Laurel snapped.� Looked like a fight was just about ready to break out, a real one this time.� Chance finally made a move and reached out, tearing Avery away, since everyone else seemed frozen in the moment. All it took was wrapping his arms around from behind, and yanking. In the scuffle, they might have forgotten his fresh face was even there. Avery certainly gave him a shocked look.� “Was that necessary?” Chance spat, breathless.� The look of surprise turned dark. Avery pulled away. “Whatever.”
(Run Through the Heather, Ransier, pg 18)
“Everyone talked about their bite, shit, like it was share circle at preschool.”� Chance blinked in surprise. “Did something real bad happen to you, Avery?”� Avery grunted. “I got tore up, but it was what it was. You’ve seen the scars. People go through worse with machines all the time.” His voice didn’t hint at any amount of upset.� “When did it happen?”� “Over summer,” he replied, in record time. Avery eased back into his contemplative drawl immediately after. “N’ the farm can’t lose a pair of hands then if they can help it. I got back to work as soon as my stitches wouldn’t open anymore. That first time, though… The change. Man. Weren’t you lucky, no one home and nothin’ else in the house.”� “What do you mean?”� Avery shot him a level stare. He swallowed, then looked away. “Worked a late night, closing up the barn...that’s where I first changed. It freaked the cows out, and it didn’t help me any, and more than anything else… I could hear ‘em but I could also...smell...n’...my body went through a lot, I didn’t know what I was doin’... Before I knew it, I had blood on me and the walls and part of a cow at my feet and the rest of it in my stomach.” He paused, then chuckled, oddly humorless. “You ever rile up a whole barn a’ cows? God. Now that’s a ruckus.” Avery paused again. He looked down at his feet, starting to scrape a foot in the dirt. “My family...they came in real quick, had their guns n’ all. Act of God that I’m still in one piece, I think. But now they’re on the look out...between ‘feral dogs’ tearing us kids up and them thinking there was one in the barn… Home ain’t safe.”� Chance swallowed at that. No wonder Avery seemed so removed from everything all the time. He couldn’t rely on anyone, or trust his luck. � “These town kids, everything’s a game,” Avery curled his lip. “Never needed to work, never had to go out at night solo. They wanna lead so bad, and we don’t even know what we’re doin’. We don’t even know if we’ll always be sensible. Sad, ain’t it?”� Chance didn’t know what to say. “Why are you telling me this?”� “Figured if anyone might get it, you would. Ain’t got much of that good will where you live, either, huh?”
Results: Setting
(Run Through the Heather, Ransier, pg 1)
In the rough tide of growing up, Chance found himself at an impasse. He stared on, feeling bags carving themselves deeper and deeper under his eyes. He could almost see his breath. Cold stung his fingers. They felt like they could snap right off. Twigs, like the ones sticking out of the barren trees around him. I’m a tree, he thought in a moment without really thinking, then withdrew the thought. If he was a tree, he wouldn’t be shivering. It was more fear than the very real cold.� It had been cloudy all day, and he could only wonder if it would let up later on. This kind of weather made him feel emptier than usual. No sun, no leaves. Everywhere you looked everything seemed dull and lifeless. It was all-too-fitting, and he hated that part more than anything else. If Wayne had died in the summer instead, that would have been different. Maybe ironic, maybe sadder in its own way, but at least it wouldn’t have made the pervasive mood even worse.� He glanced over at his companion. Avery looked just as miserable, but kept to himself. The others, the others who were still around, had flaked out again. A full moon right around the corner, and they weren’t accounted for. And Avery said nothing.� Awkward, how hard it was to talk to Avery after all this time. It wasn’t that Avery was completely unapproachable or anything, or that they had nothing to talk about. When Avery looked at him, Chance usually hesitated. He’d catch himself rethinking what he was about to say; replaying it, memorizing it, putting in failsafes so he wouldn’t look dumb. Why did it matter?� “Hey Avery?”� “Hm?” Avery took an extra moment to look back, nonchalant, almost lazy. Even after everything, he was still Avery. Sometimes Chance just wanted to scream, Act like you care! Like it mattered! But Avery's eyes were dark, sunken in. That was enough to keep Chance from snapping. They reminded him of his mother’s eyes. Maybe Avery and Mom were trees, actually.
(Run Through the Heather, Ransier, pg 10)
Chance never felt that kind of bitterness about the INCIDENT. He didn't consider what he would have done, what he should have done, or anything. Maybe because there wasn’t anything to do about it.� He did like the occasional walk, especially on rainy nights. He tended to keep his hood down; he didn’t mind his hair getting soaked and dripping. He liked when it was quiet, when it was empty, when there was no one else but him. He would pass a lamp post only once in a while. Bright islands he would pass between on his aimless journey. Sometimes he would hear someone’s dog in a fenced backyard. It wasn’t unusual to hear a train’s mourning cry in the far distance. In the summer, he could hear the crickets in the not-mowed-often-enough grass. He trod the line between road and farm field, then up next to the woods. The night of the INCIDENT, he had heard something in the brush. At first he wrote it off as a toad or rabbit or something, but then the growling started. He took a breath and kept walking, keeping his pace, hoping whichever dimwit’s loose dog or whatever wouldn’t start chasing him.� The growling grew louder, closer, nearer and nearer behind. In what felt like no time at all when he could feel warm breaths on the back of his neck. That is was when, finally, he tried to run.� His foot went out, and he was about to swing his other leg forward with momentum, but a weight crashed down on top of him before he could do more than make his first rapid step. He could hear the snarling, even feel it vibrate. Up and down his ribcage. It became all-encompassing, but it was still only background noise. He felt his flesh be squeezed tight, vise-like, then torn from his body. He breathed out a wail. Something kept raking across his back, deeper and deeper, while his shoulder and side grew warm and sticky.� In a final moment, he heard a thunderclap, which shook his body and cut off his hearing.� Everything went still.� At first the line between dead and alive felt like a blur; he was but a heap on the ground. He could only feel the rain tapping his face, and heard nothing but a steady beat under his chest. He thought the heart of the world was opening up to him. The pain came searing back only when someone started pulling his limp body up. In that moment, he might as well have been a hit deer dragged to the side of the road.
Conclusions
Works Cited
End