When government agents kick down Claire Forrester's front door and murder her parents, Claire realizes just how different she is.Okay, since the jacket isn't real helpful, here is a brief synopsis of Red Moon: a prion (which you may remember from Michael Crichton's sequel to Jurassic Park, Lost World (or from real life, if you're into that instead of sci-fi)) infection spreads throughout the world's population, going back to the 700s or so, so that in the alternative present-day, the presentation of the disease, lycan, has led to an uneasy semi-stalemate between the two populations. Percy has substituted key events in world history with lycan equivalents, from the settlement of a lycan-only home territory in the 1940s and 50s, to a lycan (rather than Weather Underground) Days of Rage in 1969. Now, two young people, one the daughter of revolutionaries, the other the son of a man working towards a vaccine, and the sole survivor of a lycan terror attack on a plane (alterna- 9/11) find themselves trying to survive and navigate the impending clash of cultures.
Patrick Gamble was nothing special until the day he got on a plane and hours later stepped off of it, the only passenger left alive, a hero.
Chase Williams has sworn to protect the people of the United States from the menace in their midst, but he is becoming the very thing he has promised to destroy.
So far, the threat has been controlled by laws and violence and drugs. But the night of the red moon is coming, when an unrecognizable world will emerge and the battle for humanity will begin.
It's an interesting idea - looking at the birth and growth of our own world's turn towards suicide killers, revolutionaries rather than armies, and decades-long guerilla warfare through the lens of werewolves - but the book doesn't quite coalesce. For one thing, it's all a little too pat. Percy's substitutions - lycan Haymarket for Haymarket, lycan Tounela for Israel/Palestine and so on - act more as a sci-fi gimmick than a plausible history of his world. Our own history happened for various complicated reasons - you can't just substitute werewolves for one half of every battle and think that's sufficient. I mean, the Weather Underground had ties to communism, civil rights, the Vietnam War, and other revolutions across the world, and in Red Moon, it's basically just...lycanthropy. Which begs the question (never really answered) - has everything else happened as we know it have happened? Was there a Vietnam War? A Korean War? What about McCarthyism? How about the Cuban Missile Crisis? Are we to assume that some form of those momentous US events happened, but always with lycans on the other side? Perhaps Percy expects us to draw from our own knowledge of history the belief that this all followed and happened naturally, but given the changes he's presented, I want to know how the WUO (here called the Revolution) started in Red Moon. As Marmaduke says in one what may be one of the worst movies ever made, "How did we come to this, Phil?"
Speaking of plausibility, I may not have traveled the Pacific Northwest extensively, but I'm pretty sure it's not the sort of place where people are constantly running into each other by happenstance. I mean, in the last fifty pages of the book, Patrick finds his father's old vaccine co-worker, then runs into Claire after like, a two year absence, right when he's about to be airlifted out with the vaccine, and then they (and the band of angry Hispanic people that - you know what, don't even ask) get attacked by the President and government agent who killed Claire's parents just happens to be along for that ride as well and tracks Claire down in a final showdown. Really? All those people just happened to be in the same place at one time? I mean, that's not even counting the way that Patrick and Claire met in the first place, or the way that Patrick literally stumbled across his MIA father while walking back to his military base. If all I had to go on was Red Moon, I would pretty much think that the West Coast (not to mention the Russian/Finish border area) was about ten square miles, and had a population of 2,000, the way people keep running into each other. And you may think that asking for plausibility in an alternate werewolf universe is stupid, but why go to the trouble of creating this setting, and making it so "gritty" and then being like, "And now I'm going to make all my main, secondary, and tertiary characters meet up!" And the way that, like Rasputin before them, many of his characters are absolutely immune to bullets, stabbings, and vicious animal attacks. It's like playing a game on cheat mode. Not that characters don't die. They do. But like, some of these people, *coughPUCKcough* should really be succumbing to the throat-stabbing, multiple gunshot wound injuries they're sustaining here.
And to top it off, after all this semi-commentary on the rise of the radical within, the book ends with a pure sci-fi/thriller moment. I guess it is not entirely out of tone, but after all the build up, you kinda expect that the denouement will be more than just some impossible-to-kill villain sprinkling poison in your corn flakes. At the very least, let the vaccine out and get the inevitable clash of those who are poisoned with those who seek treatment. Maybe Percy thought that would echo too much the course of the X-Men movies, which has may of the same themes (but, oddly enough, in a more appropriate fashion - at least it doesn't pretend above its station) and has the same "if we can't beat 'em, make 'em just like us" plan. But instead, after the great battle over the vaccine, we're left watching Patrick take the last dose, and knowing that it's all going to be irrelevant shortly anyway, since we'll all be lycan in a few months. Or, I dunno, dead, I guess? It was hard to figure that out, since they poisoned the original lycans before grinding up their bones to make the bread, and that stuff probably really travels through the food chain. Like mercury poisoning. It also begs the question - why did they bomb the shit out of the Tri-Cities if they were just going to infect everyone anyway? Wouldn't a mass-scale infection like that be easier to spread if your infrastructure hadn't just had a bomb dropped on it? Don't we want roads and shit to be working, and the military force safely focused on another country?
Percy's writing in Red Moon isn't bad - a little too simile filled, too descriptive-heavy, for my taste, but it does the job of getting the mood across very well. Everything is ominous - it's not just blonde hair, it's seaweed spread across the beach at low tide, all the animals are all meaty or sinewy, voices are mucousy, glass splinters, adrenaline stabs, and mountains rise like fangs. I think that if you want to enjoy Red Moon, it needs to be read for what it is - an alternative werewolf history/thriller - rather than what it could be - sharp-edged commentary on our own political morass. It's fairly gruesome, but mostly earned. I'm just wishing that it made a bit more sense.
