The Beast in Aisle 34

Meet Sandy Kurtz, a 31-year old married man, soon to be father, history major, with a voracious albeit unique appetite. To put it mildly, Sandy is somewhat content in his dull life as an assistant floor manager in bathroom fixtures at his rural Michigan Lowes. But like many other people, Sandy struggles with finding meaning in his drab life: his sex life is minimal within the struggled marriage, he feels emasculated, and his small Midwest town is filled with Sasquatch fanatics, coworkers trying to get him into LARPing, and a bad case of unfulfilled small-town living. Oh, and I almost forgot, once a month—on a full moon—Sandy's body stretches, contorts, tears open, pops tendons, distends its jaw, and grows a thick layer of fur and matching razor sharp teeth and claws as he transforms into a bipedal hulking 7 foot tall, behemoth of a werewolf, prowling the woods near his home for wildlife to consume. The thing is, like with his everyday boring life cycle of Lowes kitchen sales, lack of friend circles, and a marital life in shambles, wildlife just isn't cutting it anymore; Sandy craves tastier meat, hungers for more than rodents and deer, needs more...deserves more so he thinks.

Darrin Doyle's dark comedy werewolf horror story packs a whole lot of wit and juicy gory detail into each of his sentences. There's an entertainingly fulfilling pleasure to his prose, making for quite a page turner—a popular literal appraisal I don't use liberally. I couldn't wait to sit back down and open up this beautifully covered book—seriously, the vibrant yellow cover with a prominent blood red man-wolf on the cover begs to be pulled off shelves—sinking my teeth in to feed my ferocious appetite. There's a really fun dichotomy to Sandy's struggle, stuck on autopilot within his own body throughout his dead-end job and lacklustre domestic life, contrasted with his momentary bloodthirsty apex power trips as the unstoppable lycanthrope. But Beast in Aisle 34 isn't all violence, blood, gore, and fur, Doyle does a great job at adding complex depth to his protagonist, while also painting a strikingly fervent depiction of cold rural Midwest life. I've already bought one of Doyle's prior books, The Dark Will End the Dark.

I highly recommend The Beast in Aisle 34 to any fellow fan of dark wit and werewolf tales—no surprise to see Doyle thank an early childhood viewing of An American Werewolf in London in the end. Beast in Aisle 34 would make for a great film, and I'm picturing Jesse Plemons as Sandy.