“I’m a doctor, and I won’t accept irrational explanations.”

15. Deadly Friendship – Candice Arkham

This is the first book I’ve read where lycanthrope means vampire or werewolf and not just werewolf, even though this is set in Louisiana and they’re talking about a loup-garou, which is not a vampire…here it is a taste for blood and hereditary and Charon is either going mad or has the hereditary disease now that she’s inherited her family home and is living there. And she wants her college roommate and modern gal Cary to come down. Cary, who doesn’t want to have anything more to do with Bob, the married guy she was dating who she didn’t know was married and wants to leave Cleveland because of this and how bored she was at her job. What a shit Bob is.

Anyway, that horrible ending leaves her free to come to the swamp and watch her friend descend into madness while surrounded by three elderly ladies and a young guy who is just creepy enough to try and hit on an older woman and also get butthurt about her talking to another man. I get the impression Jerico is 14, which is not a good age to date a woman who finished college, even if he has a boat and a sordid past of getting kicked out of school.

Charon and Cary investigate the giant house on the swamp while Marie scowls, Janette seems really sweet, and Flora drinks – and while those three do Obeah rituals which are not clearly intended to help or hurt Charon’s ideas about how she’s becoming a loup-garou. Charon is in part super worried because children keep going missing throughout the area and her house has, of course, been the scene of many an atrocity and cruel family member, some who may still be around.

However, Cary will also still have a chance to find love in the swamp with a doctor named Jed who is from the area. She even helps him with a home birth while he’s translating the weird little book in Latin for her that tells them a lycanthrope is more a vampire than werewolf, which was where I got the impression the author doesn’t know much about horror or Latin, so disbelief not suspended.

 

Until you know what monster it is, Murderface isn’t helping. She knows how humid it is out there.