A wolf’s sense of smell is about 100 times stronger than that of a human, according to the International Wolf Center. There aren’t any stats on what this might mean for werewolves, but Northampton-based author Connie Senior has penned her best guess.
In “Blue Moon,” the third book in her fictional trilogy following “half-man and half-monster” Caleb O’Connor, her character has come a long way from the Transylvanian Alps to the forests of New England, where he keeps tabs on local werewolves and vampires for “the Agency.” Vampires are always scary, but werewolves are most dangerous during “the Change,” the one night each month when, under the light of the full moon, humans transform into their lupine counterparts with animal instincts.
Senior’s latest installment in her “Club and Fang series” launches on Nov. 10 at the Northampton Center for the Arts at 33 Hawley. The Kindle version is available for pre-order for $3.99 on Amazon, where the paperback (Bitingduck Press, 312 pages, $16.99) is coming soon.
Before reading any further, you may want to put on the author’s novel-specific playlist — 161 songs about, amongst other things, howling at the moon.
“Blue Moon” opens after a local senator’s granddaughter is bitten by a pack of… dogs? Coyotes? O’Connor and his human partner, Agent Hulstad, both suspect werewolves. While Hulstad takes perfunctory notes in the woods, O’Connor just breathes in through his nose:
“In the clearing that afternoon,” writes Senior, “he’d detected the traces of the human girl, Amy King—sparkling red sizzle, guttering nutmeg flame, sulfurous dank water, new-mown hay.” And with her, he’d sensed, had been four werewolves, including a male pup, a male adult and two females. An adolescent about Amy’s age had emanated “orange glowing embers, marine iodine taste, wind sighing in trees, electric crackle.” And an adult – her pack mom – had radiated “resinous pine, white-hot incandescence, rough cracked brown bark, oozy slippery molasses.” The descriptors aren’t just a peek inside the mind of 26-year-old O’Connor; they also telegraph that the females are fiery characters whose scents make a certain sense when they are introduced to the reader.
Senior — nutmeg, quivery silver mercury bead, peat smoke — herself may also be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. After learning to read when she was three, she began banging out detective stories on a typewriter in elementary school and then pivoted to environmental engineering. “I always wanted to know how things worked,” said Senior. “A lot of my career was spent trying to understand how air pollution is generated in industrial processes, then figuring out how to control it — both working in the laboratory and going out to power plants and stomping around in big boots and a hard hat.”
Since earning her doctorate in environmental engineering at the California Institute of Technology in 1984, she has spent 42 years protecting the Earth.
But in her free time, she has also been a wolf on the prowl.
After reading the seven-part “Harry Potter” series’ pathetic portrayal of lycanthrope Remus Lupin, she, busy with work and caring for two children, bided her time. But, as far as she was concerned, she practically growled to the Gazette, “J.K. Rowling just didn’t do right by the werewolf. He ended up being a whiny coward for several books, and only redeemed himself by being tragically killed in the final book.”
She would do better.
After a redemptive stint as a “Harry Potter” fanfic writer in the early aughts, she published her first book about the complicated and courageous O’Connor, “Only the Moon Howls,” in 2013. The second book, “The Wolf’s Den,” came out in 2021.
Then something fantastic happened.
“Just before I started the third book in the series, I gave myself permission to be a real writer instead of just a person who was always writing a novel,” said the author. Before, she was a story-lover; now, she was a storyteller. Soon the shape-shifter had a morning writing routine, and after she and her husband moved to Northampton in 2023, Senior found the local literary organization, the Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop, where she wrote and revised “Blue Moon” in their 10-Month Manuscript Program with an eight-person cohort.
“Writing is a solitary activity,” she said, “but it really benefits from community.”
Finding community is a central theme of “Blue Moon” — a title, and a phenomenon, that Senior said speaks to second chances. (Occasionally there are two full moons in one month; a second full moon is called a “Blue Moon.”) O’Connor is a hero plagued with self-loathing, or loathing for the wolf inside him. While tracking down the creatures that bit Amy and becoming entangled with more than one vampire, he wrestles with his own stark limitations, even wondering if the world would be better off without him.
Meanwhile, his adopted son Bela, Senior’s favorite character, navigates the ins and outs of adolescence and his own werewolfy insecurity, while helping a new friend understand “the Change.” No characters, not even the humans in the story, have tidy lives. “There’s lots of abandonment, and trauma and terrible parents,” said the author. “I want the characters to create a family, which I think they do at the end,” vampires notwithstanding, with an unspoken pact — or pack.
Plans for a Bela “offshoot book” are in the works. Fans can follow along on Senior’s Substack or conniesenior.com. Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.