Little Women Month: Little Women and Werewolves by Louisa May Alcott and Porter Grand

For the first entry in this month’s Little Women Month, I’ll be looking at the mashup novel “Little Women and Werewolves”, by Louisa May Alcott…and Porter Grand

My oh my.  How in the world did a book like this get published?  It’s easy enough to figure out if you look at the trends that were popular at the time of its release.   First there was “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, which became an unexpected runaway hit.  Soon afterwards, bookstores were awash in novels like “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters” and “Android Karenina.”  While P&P&Z managed to spoof the novel while injecting sci-fi and horror elements,  Little Women and Werewolves takes the Android Karenina route – it takes large swaths of Louise May Alcott’s writing and interjects vignettes with werewolves in it.

The novel is frustratingly uneven in that understands the author’s rhythms and phraseology.    They even appreciate Alcott’s secret love for melodramatic, soapy ridiculousness (she did start her career as a writer of melodramas that were so purple they would’ve delighted Jo, after all).  But as the story wears on and the passages get smaller the story just feels too bizarrely unnatural amid all of the OOC carnage and the odd pairing-related digressions.

There are some major changes made to the plotline, chief of which is the decision to replace the Civil War with a werewolves-versus-humans battle.   It’s one of the few alterations made to the text that works; in reading this story you’ll be greeted by the sight of Jo fantasizing about rolling around in blood and being seduced by Laurie.   And if you stick around you’ll get to enjoy the idea of a Beth/Mr. Laurence pairing.

For me, the way the two of them came together was a sticking point – the way the author chooses to subvert Beth’s illness and the mental image of not only Beth sleeping with her graceful older benefactor but allowing herself to be eaten alive by him.  Completely.

It all ends up as it does in the book – moral treatises about how to be  good wives and women and werewolves all at once – with Jo sired to Frederich and Amy sired to Laurie and the werewolves and humans all living in interbred harmony. 

Sadly, the novel fails at gothic horror (there’s far too much innocence left in its folds and creases to allow for that); it fails as a romance and as a children’s novel.  In the end it’s a curiosity – one that’s almost admirable in its single-minded silliness but doesn’t successfully reconstruct the narrative in the way Pride and Prejudice and Zombies dared to do.