Henry Goodwolf

Henry Goodwolf is a fake-medieval monster-hunting novel that wants to be a bawdy monastic chronicle, a locked-island murder mystery, a bestiary parody, a dark comedy about masculinity, and a metafictional anti-romance about heroic legend. It is also much too pleased with that combination. The book is narrated by Brother Achardus, a painfully scrupulous Benedictine monk on the Isle of May, and its main joke is immediately obvious: the world is bloody, sexual, stupid, and chaotic, while Achardus keeps trying to understand it through silence, rules, prayer, pedantic distinctions, and the authority of old books. That joke is repeated until it becomes less funny than exhausting.

The preface already announces the book’s problem. Achardus’s “host” complains that the book is incomprehensible smut, confusing the canonical hour of “sext” with sex. Achardus explains the Benedictine schedule of prayer, the host says he should “just write that,” and the novel proceeds to do the exact opposite: archaic diction, pseudo-scholarly digressions, filthy jokes, bestiary lore, and deliberate obscurity. It is a joke about readability that also becomes an admission of unreadability.

The story proper begins with a long bestiary entry about hyenas, Pliny, Aristotle, sexual metamorphosis, and Clement of Alexandria calling the hyena a pervert. This leads to Henry Goodwolf, a famous old monster-slayer who supposedly killed a hyena on the battlefield of Damascus by poisoning French corpses with lead and arsenic, then cutting off the beast’s head. He now wears half its jaw around his neck. This is typical of the book’s method: start with a medieval monster fact, make it gross, make it sexual, then drag it into a joke about masculinity. It feels less like narrative momentum than a writer showing off the reading pile.