A Family Saga with Bones in the Cellar: Melanie Tem’s Wilding

In a certain part of Denver, there is a courtyard that holds four houses. Two of them are empty now, but when they were first built, they belonged to a quartet of sisters who had done plenty of traveling over their surprisingly long lifetimes:

The sisters had come most recently from wooded, green, and rainy Pennsylvania. Before that they’d lived in the Everglades, on an island off the Carolina coast, on the English moors, at the northern edge of the Black Forest, high and deep in the Carpathian Mountains. They’d lived in caves dug or discovered in hills or mountainsides, dens made of branches and stones, once a village decimated by the Plague, once a gutted cathedral. Never before had they lived in a city, or in homes they’d had any hand in constructing.

Many of their descendants—the daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters of all but one, and even the youngest sister herself, escaping—would later assume the traditional ways again, would retreat to remote canyons at and above timberline on both sides of the Continental Divide among still-scouring glaciers and pine trees nearly unrecognizable as pines because they’d been transformed into hideous and wonderful shapes by the alpine winds. And the women who stayed in Denver would turn their attention to other things, so that the houses became simply places where they lived or did not live. But at the time, the construction of the four houses had been a spirited sibling contest and a joining of them together against all the world that was not family.

Two of the sisters were dead now. Theodora and Emma were finally dead, their bones in the basements of the houses they’d built, their severed skulls at the foot of the basement steps like gargoyles granting or denying entrance. Mary and Hannah survived. Mary and Hannah, the murderers and devourers of their sisters, winnowing, focusing, consolidating the power. Each of the other, too, if she could. When the time was right. Wilding, 2-3

The other occupants include several generations of relatives to those original sisters. They are quiet folks. Keep to themselves. Adhere to some unusual and surprisingly bloody traditions. These women are werewolves, you see, and as they are preparing to welcome their young member Deborah’s child into the fold—well, the ritual welcomes only girl children and devours boys—that young woman makes the bullheaded decision to run away. It is a decision that will have ripple effects, drawing out the matriarch of the clan, inviting some of her children to plot an overthrow and a shift of power, and dredge up plenty of drama. After all, few know deep seated and repressive dramas like the members of a dysfunctional family steeped in them …

Melanie Tem chronicles these circumstances as well as the lives, lusts, loves, and longings of a large cast of characters in the epic dark fantasy novel, Wilding.

How does an author follow up the Bram Stoker Award winning first novel Prodigal, an intimate exploration of psychic trauma, ghosts and sinister councilors who may or may not also be psychic vampires feeding upon the anxieties of teenage charges? By penning a novel that luxuriates in the big passions of a family of shapechangers. Going big, in other words. Sure, Wilding is not technically Tem’s second novel (that would be Blood Moon), it is nevertheless Tem’s second release for Dell’s Abyss line. Like Prodigal, it is an exploration of family dynamics juxtaposed with supernatural dangers. This time, however, it finds more sympathy with the monsters than normal people. The family at this novel’s heart is a group of outsiders who have somehow come to live just down the street from those they would prey upon in previous decades …

Wilding is a book with a rotating set of perspective characters. The book is again told in third person restricted. We hop from one head to another only after changing chapters. Tem’s narrative leans toward the literary side of the literary-horror equation. She ably finds the voice of the characters through the way they process information and how they interact with one another. Their voices are distinct.

So, Deborah is brash but vulnerable, supercharged with a young woman’s self-assurance that she knows how the world works but confronted by her own sheltered ignorance at every turn. She finds unlikely allies in this city and plenty of people (men mostly) who want to use her to satisfy their own desires.

Deborah’s mother Lydia is plagued both by memories of the harsh ways she treated her daughter (all necessary, she believed then and believes now, to give the child a fair chance at surviving in this family) while also carrying conflicted feelings about the man who sired her child.

Deborah’s grandmother Ruth and Marguerite are cousins who feel the time may be coming to claim the power they feel owed to them. One of them is eager enough to kill for it, and the other is reluctant, content to wait for a natural transition … that might never actually come.

Meanwhile, Deborah’s great grandmother Mary is more beast than human, prowling the city as a wolf in search of her granddaughter, eager to find bring her and her spawn back to the fold for the proper rituals. She is bold and perhaps short sighted, confident to the point of overconfidence, and this winds up biting her on the hind end.

This is akin to the family sagas Anne Rice was exploring in her Witches books but told in a far leaner fashion. Tem’s prose balances the fantastique and the real without indulging itself in quite the same way Rice does. We get a sense of the history and these women’s place in it, but we are never overburdened with glimpses into every part of that history.

Whereas much of the action of Prodigal was internalized, with some creepy sequences of a psychic reaping that played out in an unsettling, sexualized manner, the violence in Wilding is much more visceral. So, when Deborah is being badgered by a hideous dude on the bus, she gets her revenge in a decidedly squirm worthy fashion:

“Leave me alone, dickhead.” This time it was clear.

“How about a kiss, then? Just one little kiss?” He grabbed her chin with his bloody hand, twisted her face toward him, and brought his mouth down hard over hers. His blood was getting on her, sticky and warm.

Deborah shoved her right hand around to the back of his neck, grabbed his greasy hair, and held his head in place. Under his grinding, insulting mouth, she opened her lips and then her teeth. With her left hand she jerked his zipper down and reached inside his fly to wrap her fingers around his hard dick. He made a sound.

She bit down then, as hard and fast as she could around his pursed lips, and at the same time inserted the long, sharp nail of her little finger under the elastic leg of his underwear and scraped it across his balls. He made another, louder noise and tried to pull back, but she had him by the hair and by the dick and for several long, satisfying seconds he couldn’t get away from her.

Finally he did. His mouth was ringed with blood. He pulled his fist back to hit her, but he was too close to get a good angle. There was blood on his cheeks and chin, too, and on her teeth, tasting like metal, feeling slick. Her left hand was still inside his pants so she closed it into a fist, which drove the long nail into the head of his penis with a nice little pop.

He yelled and got his hands on her neck, but his friend was pulling him off. The woman with the newspaper wasn’t there anymore, had gotten off or moved to a more peaceful seat. The asshole with the bad teeth pushed the guy from behind. Deborah held on to the dick for a Few more seconds, reveling in the feel of it, marveling that it was still hard. But she finally had to let it go, and the bus stopped and the dude and his friend got off without even looking back at her.

“Are you all right?” the asshole with the bad teeth wanted to know. Just because he’d helped her out a little he thought he had some kind of claim. He stunk; his smell made her nostrils flare. He had such a gentle smile that she could hardly stand to look at it.

“Leave me alone, dickhead,” Deborah snarled. Her feet still up under her, she turned herself away from him and put her long nail in her mouth. Her teeth were still slippery from the guy’s blood and her own, but when she ran the points of her teeth over the nail a scum came away easily, the faintly salty residue of the skin of his balls.

Deborah’s mind was very clear, and different somehow. Almost wordless. Almost thoughtless.

Images without meaning, nearly without name. Vivid colors, a rush of taste and odor, primal and marauding emotions. Fear, maybe. Fury. Love. The baby gathered itself inside her and kicked hard. Wilding, 120-122

This is splatterpunk composed from beautiful prose and an acute attentiveness to psychology. The action is quick and mean, the scrape and pop associated with the nail on his genitalia is a pair of sensory details that sell the action (and makes many a dude cross his legs in sympathy with the antagonist), but Tem is not content to just show us the violence. It has an effect on Deborah herself, triggering her own emotional responses as well as causing physiological ones (which convince the baby to kick at just that moment). This is a complicated, believably messy response to the unsettling action we’ve just read.

While Tem’s prose is quite approachable and ultimately immersive, it does take a bit of time to get into the rhythm and flow of this book’s narrative. Prodigal also requested some patience on the reader’s part, and while the initial chapters won’t necessarily pay off that patience straight away, it is rewarded as the story progresses. Still, not every reader will be able to extend the patience of getting into the story. This does not necessarily have the easygoing prose of a Stephen King novel. It’s a layered approach, which can be a tad too demanding for some and overwhelming for others. Folks with a preference for invisible prose that flows like river rapids may be thrown at first, but the experience is ultimately worth the wait.

Wilding is a wildly different sort of story than Melanie Tem’s previous book. A slippery and sleek yarn of shapeshifters in 1990s Colorado, a family chronicle with meat and gristle, and a terrific entry in the Dell Abyss line. Taken along with Prodigal, it ably demonstrates Tem’s range as a writer, and shows her penchant for writing prose that disturbs through both psychological and visceral avenues. She was one hell of a writer.

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Once released as a part of the Dell Abyss line of paperback originals, Wilding is currently available in an eBook edition.

On Tuesday, we will take a look at the seventh Easy Rawlins book, Bad Boy Brawly Brown. It is available in paperback, hardcover, eBook, and audiobook editions.

Next Thursday, we will take a look at another of Melanie Tem’s works from the 1990s. The Tides chronicles the odd occurrences in a retirement community after a supernatural presence intrudes. It is available in eBook and audiobook versions.

“A Family Saga with Bones in the Cellar: Melanie Tem’s Wilding” is copyright © 2024 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the Dell Abyss paperback edition, released in 1992. Second cover image taken from the Crossroad Press eBook edition, released in 2016.

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