A Noble Craft

The question is asked all the time, usually in unpoetic moments; it’s an occupational hazard of teaching literature. There I’ll be at the clinic, sinuses on fire, when sure enough the doctor asks, “What’s your favourite book?” My practised answer, no hemming and hawing, is Moby-Dick. Everyone’s heard of it, and it sounds reassuringly substantial. (No one wants to hear a professor say Twilight.) “Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience,” I’ll mumble to myself as I walk out with my prescription.

So I was predisposed to enjoy Jason Guriel’s The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles, which starts with an epigraph from Melville: “I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.” That last phrase sets the stage for Guriel’s whalers, whose world is wolfish indeed. They are, after all, werewolves:

But nighttime suited...