Author Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf (turned into the forgettable movie Silver Bullet) is a rapid fire 12 chapter short story about a werewolf hunting a New England town. If you’ve never visited New England we have a distinct character than the rest of America. We’re known as frugal, lovers of the Boston Red Sox, who revel in the seasonal cycles and then bemoan those same seasonal cycles. King, a native New Englander, captures perfectly the seasons, regional peculiarities, and quirky local behaviors of residents in the six state region.

What King also does effectively is to introduce the werewolf to our modern folklore. Unless you return to the Wabanaki Malsumsis legend, which has been called into question, the lands of New England have a sparse folkloric relationship with the lycanthrope. There are some encounters with wolves that primed colonial New Englanders for fear, but they never became…