I usually write a bunch of posts ahead of time and save them for those occasions when I might be working on a longer series and don’t have the time to write the daily post, or when I’m pressed for time for other reasons. Sometimes those posts get pushed down in the unwritten and half-written queue and I forget about them. That’s what happened to this one, which I wrote months ago.

The first John Wick movie is set in motion when the primary villain of the piece kills the puppy that Wick’s late wife had given him to remember her by. It’s that act of violence that ends up justifying Wick’s rampage of revenge that consumes the remainder of the film.

I quite enjoyed it.

Unlike its sequels.

I tried watching the second Wick movie and without the righteous justification that the first one provided, it seemed like just one unmotivated violent action sequence after another.

Now I hasten to add that in real life I don’t necessarily consider the killing of a dog sufficient justification to go on a violent killing rampage, but in the fantasy of a film, it’s a different story.

Which brings me to my recent traversal of my back issues of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been going through them, mainly reading the Asimov editorials and the letters columns, with a quick stopover at the book reviews and then if there was an Asimov story (he was still writing perhaps one story every three or four months), I’d read that.

But if a few readers’ letters mentioned a particular story favorably, I’d go back to the issue in question and check it out.

That was the case with a relatively new writer who came up with a coming of age story about a young girl who was being bullied at school right around the time that she was experiencing her first period. The letter writers described it as a revenge story and a new take on the werewolf trope.

Sounded interesting, so I went back and started reading it.

And for the first few pages it was very good. The young girl in question was being bullied in school and had a step mother at home that she didn’t feel comfortable talking to, and then she began to experience the signs of her first period. It was very sensitively written, I thought.

Of course, it was in a science fiction magazine so the fantastic element soon appeared. Along with her period, she began to turn into a wolf at night, which of course freaked her out. The first night she simply remained in her room.

But the second night, she prepared for it and made sure that if it happened again, she’d be able to get outside the doors. Which she did.

And then she encountered a dog.

And she ate it.

In fact she ate two more dogs that night.

It was at that point that I stopped reading.

She was supposed to be the protagonist of the story, but I had lost all sympathy for her.

You just don’t kill dogs in my system of morality and remain a sympathetic character.

Besides, dogs are direct descendants of wolves, so there’s something almost cannibalistic about a wolf eating a dog. Not to mention creepy and icky. On the other hand, had she eaten a few stray cats… 

If you want to judge for yourself, here it is. It’s called “Boobs” by Suzy Mckee Chamas. (Hmm. Maybe I should have titled this post “Boobs”; it might increase my readership…)