Carniepunk: The Werewife

by Jaye Wells

Chills and thrills abound in this wild story of marital discord and fuzzy threats from USA TODAY bestselling author Jaye Wells—from the Carniepunk urban fantasy anthology.One week after she is bitten by the dog-faced boy at a traveling carnival, a mild-mannered housewife gets a sudden, unrelenting craving for raw meat. She doesn’t remember eating the cat or running naked through the park under the full moon, but her husband’s getting strange calls from concerned neighbors. When he takes her back to the carnival a year later, looking for a cure, it’ll either get better…or a whole lot worse.

Genres: Urban Fantasy, Short Stories, Horror, Fantasy, Audiobook

34 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 12, 2015

About the author

Jaye Wells is a former magazine editor whose award-winning speculative fiction novels have hit several bestseller lists. She holds an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, and is a sought-after speaker on the craft of writing. When she’s not writing or teaching, she loves to travel to exotic locales, experiment in her kitchen like a mad scientist, and try things that scare her so she can write about them in her books. She lives in Texas.

Want free fiction from Jaye? Check out www.jayewells.com for details!

Reviews

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this story. It's juicy as hell & hooked me right from the first sentence, then doesn't fail to deliver for the remainder of the story. It's about the epitome of a dysfunctional marriage, and it made me seriously wonder if Annie & Brad ever communicated with each other. I mean, Annie complains that she always has to be passive & let Brad take the lead during sex, but in his narration, he wants Annie to be more assertive & he basically has a dominatrix kink, lmao. So...??? They literally want the same thing and probably could have avoided the entire mess they got themselves into if they just communicated to begin with... The ending is really satisfying since Brad finally ditches Annie, though. Throughout the story, she's shown to have a bad attitude toward everything & everyone, way before she's cursed to become a werewolf, and she's an abusive wife and terrible person in general. During her narration, she constantly puts Brad down and makes it seem like he's spineless or something, but his narration makes it pretty clear that she's just gaslighting the shit out of him. He literally could have abandoned her when she first became a werewolf, but he didn't! Sure, maybe it was because he was afraid that Annie might hunt him down and kill him if he did (a very valid concern, all things considered), but his narration suggests that he was equally invested in finding a way to make his marriage work and cure Annie, despite everything she did to him. He also literally dug graves and covered up murder for her... if that's not devotion, I don't know what is. And yet, by the end of the story, she was still diminishing his self-worth and failing to appreciate anything he did for her... so it was satisfying when he finally just walked away, ha!

[Yolanda Sfetsos · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first thing I need to mention is how cool the title is. I mean, it fits the story but it also sounds so cool.

Brad has a problem: his wife changes every month. Annie has a problem: she kinda likes becoming a beast every month.

Yeah, that's pretty much the gist of the story. It's a great study about two people who resent each other but insist on staying together. The whole werewolf thing becomes a way to hide behind all their other marital problems, but when they return to the carnival that started everything, some really surprising things happen.

I didn't expect their problems to turn out the way they did, which is very cool. I like unpredictable endings.

Great story!

[Samantha Rooney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed it. Great character development. Perfect length and creepy vibe was excellent

[Debbie Chittenden · Rating 2 out of 5]

So my thought process is:

If you are going to write a short story give me something to go with. A few sentences or paragraphs tell me absolutely nothing. It's very disappointing!

[Christina · Rating 2 out of 5]

3.5

[Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

3.5

[Cas ♛ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most compelling in this collection I've read so far! Loving the great short stories in this collection. Spooky, and awesome is The Werewife. The ending is shocking though.

[Sanacrow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good read, well written, engaging story, and an ending I didn't see coming.