“There’s a werewolf in the swamp…”
Twelve-year-old Grady Tucker and his family move from their northeast home in Vermont to a house in Florida located at the edge of a swamp. Grady and his older sister Emily find the area boring and isolating but they enjoy the thrill of wandering around the swamp. The Tuckers moved to a remote swamp because his parents are both scientists conducting an experiment. Grady’s father, Michael F. Tucker, is a scientist working for the University of Vermont in Burlington. He has captured a group of six rare “swamp deer” from a South American jungle and relocated them to Florida in order to study their habituation in the swamp (“swamp deer” are red-colored with large webbed hooves).
Very quickly, the swamp becomes eerie, foreboding, and atmospheric. Grady looks out his bedroom window using his binoculars and he watches shadows move through the trees. It is overgrown and easy to get lost in but nevertheless Grady and his sister explore the swamp together, but the deeper they go, the further from civilization they find themselves; the more dense are the trees; the more cacophonous are the sounds of insects and frogs; and the more helpless the kids feel. It’s also worth noting that Grady’s house is remote, it is situated far from town, the mail only gets delivered twice per week. This only adds to the sense of panic and isolation in this novel. At night, Grady hears angry howling from deep within the swamp, while above the pale moon shines through the low hanging tree branches.
In time, Grady hears local rumors about a “swamp hermit,” who is described as an apparently harmless man who lives off-the-grid somewhere inside the swamp. Then one day, while Grady and his sister are exploring, they find a gurgling bog and a nearby thatch house made of dried reeds, grass, and palm leaves. There are also signs of a campfire, shoes, and then the fearsome swamp hermit himself appears. He is an older man with long gray white hair in a pony tail and bent shoulders who wildly chases the kids away from his dwelling. Naturally, when Grady and his sister arrive back home, sweaty and out of breath, Grady’s parents don’t see anything worrisome about the kids’ story (parental gaslighting is often employed throughout the Goosebumps books).
Grady manages to befriend another boy who lives nearby named Will Blake. He tells Grady the history of a horrible fever that many locals contracted in the swamp about a hundred years ago and it made them all go crazy (hence why they call it the “fever swamp”). Grady also befriends another local kid, an oddball named Cassie O’Rourke who is convinced there is a werewolf lurking about. Shortly thereafter, Grady contracts a fever! Could it be the dreaded swamp fever? He manages to recover and randomly adopts a large stray dog whom he names “Wolf.” Then horrible things start happening –numerous animals are found mutilated in the swamp and around town, and a neighbor goes missing. Many people suspect Grady’s dog is the culprit, including Grady’s father, but since there has been a full moon out lately, Grady and his friends come to believe the “swamp hermit” might actually be a werewolf preying upon animals and people in the night.
Of course, none of the adults in the story believe in werewolves so it’s up to the kids to uncover this mystery themselves. When Grady hears more howling in the night, he wanders out of his room and into the swamp where he suddenly comes upon Will who says he has also heard the howling. Together, they search for the “swamp hermit,” but they get separated in the bog and suddenly Grady is attacked! He is pushed to the ground and bitten and as it turns out, the werewolf has been none other than Will this whole time! Grady looks on in horror at the fur on Will’s face and the vicious look in his eyes. But Grady’s big dog Wolf suddenly arrives and fights off Will, sending him running on all fours away through the swamp. Then Grady blacks out. He wakes up to learn that the “swamp hermit” rescued him (a la Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird) and in a double twist, Grady himself has now become a werewolf as a result of Will’s bite. The book ends with Grady gazing out into the swamp, ready to start hunting:
“I’m standing at my bedroom window now, watching the full moon rising over the distant trees. This first full moon in a month makes me think of Will… Will may be gone, but he changed my life. I know I’ll never forget him… I can feel the fur sprouting on my face. My snout is expanding, and my fangs are sliding out between my dark lips… Yes, when he bit me, Will passed the curse on to me” (122-123).
In my opinion, The Werewolf of Fever Swamp is one of the more ominous, atmospheric books in the Goosebumps canon. This is a surprisingly brutal, gory children’s horror story –there are mutilated birds, slain deer, missing neighbors, a gurgling bog that threatens to swallow people up, and an old man in a bloodstained shirt lurking around the swamp. The protagonist Grady suffers quite a bit of trauma in this one (he gets lost in the swamp, chased by a maniac, attacked by a werewolf, and at one point he is even nearly killed by a poisonous snake bite). The climax of this book is a bit rushed and there are still some lingering questions about the “swamp fever” –was the “swamp fever” just a werewolf preying upon people a hundred years ago?
The plot twist at the end in which Grady becomes a werewolf isn’t all that surprising, but it still packs a punch and the rest of The Werewolf of Fever Swamp is a highly menacing tale. In the end, the fearful protagonist becomes the feared villain. It is a unique plot structure. Interestingly, however, there is no clear moral lesson learned in this book. In The Haunted Mask, Carly Beth donned the evil mask to terrorize her tormenters, only to learn the error of her vengeful ways, but in The Werewolf of Fever Swamp, Grady Tucker spends much of the book investigating a suspected werewolf in the swamp only to accidentally end up as the very murderous creature he has been seeking.
Stine, R.L. The Werewolf of Fever Swamp. Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY, 1993.