CZM Book Club: Hollywood Werewolf Conspiracy, by Hailey Piper

Margaret reads you a story about werewolves, polyamory, and cycles of trauma.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media book Club, The Club, the Club, the Club. Hello,
and welcome to School Zone Media book Club, the only
book club where you don't have to do the reading
because I do it for you. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy.
And it's spooky Month, or as you might say, spooky month,

(00:26):
but you extend out the oh's a lot like spooooooky,
but then it just sounds like I'm saying cookie crisp,
which I'm not. But it's still spooky month. And so
we're doing horror, which is a word that I'm going
to pronounce that way until I die. And this week
I am reading a short story by Hailey Piper called

(00:49):
Hollywood were Wolf Conspiracy. It's a short story about well,
there's were wolves in it. You probably figured that part out,
and there's polyamory their cycles of trauma. But by and
large it's a story about story, but not an annoying way.
It's about tropes and genre convention because it's from a

(01:10):
twenty twenty two collection called It Was All a Dream,
An Anthology of Bad Horror Tropes Done Right, which was
edited by Brandon Applegate, and it's a short story collection
that has a bunch of good stories in it that
are just like, well, they kind of do what they
say on the cover. It's an anthology of bad horror

(01:30):
tropes done right, and so they just like are consciously
playing with tropes. And I don't know, I have I
have complicated feelings about tropes and writing too tropes and
subverting tropes and things like that in fiction, and I
think that this is a story that does it well.
And I like the conscious subversion of tropes, but I

(01:52):
also I sometimes get annoyed. Okay, this is like really
not about this story at all. I actually just like
really like the story. But in general, I was once
on this panel at this reading and they asked all
of the authors on the panel like what we liked
about tropes and writing to tropes and things like that,
and everyone was like, oh, you know, tropes are these
like interesting tools and storytelling techniques, and you know, they

(02:15):
help understand the reader's expectations and stuff. And I was
kind of the sole one who is like, I kind
of hate tropes. I kind of hate like over analyzing
whether or not I'm playing into tropes or not playing
into tropes. But that's because I am fundamentally oppositional, and
when you're gonna do it. You should do it like
this Hollywood Werewolf Conspiracy by Haley Piper. Selina sits crammed

(02:48):
into the cabin's bedroom corner, a hammer in one hand
and her inherited silver amulet in the other. She flattens
the amulet down and bangs it with a hammer, desperate
to pound murder into its shape. The cabin's dusty floor
makes a poor blacksmith's sanvill and her grandmother's heirloom makes

(03:08):
a poor bullet. But together they might become a weapon
of a sort, And maybe then Tonight's horror show wo
finally end. Silver is silver, Selena whispers, through sweat and panic.
The hammer strikes again. Has to work. Silver is silver.

(03:28):
All this whispering and striking might draw unwanted attention were
it not for the storm of growling and screaming in
the cabin's living room. Selena keeps at it. If she's
not ready for Frankie when he finishes with Marvin, there'll
be no hiding her sour scent from what he's become.

(03:48):
Silver is silver. The omulet dnse with enough of a
slant to make a kind of silver shive, and that
should be enough to drive it through werewolf flesh, it
has to be. Selina creeps toward the bedroom door and
glimpses a blood bathed living room, smashed furniture, litters, the
floor decorated by purple innerds. Their shadows dance away from

(04:12):
the fireplace. Beside the top oled sofa lies a carved
idol of teeth and wood, the one Frankie pulled from
an old oak's hollow this afternoon. Some trapper or woodland
witch must have set it there a century or so ago,
But there's no book to explain the rest, only the
senses upon seeing what came next. Once upon a time,

(04:37):
Frankie was a clean shaven guy of skin and bones.
But now he's a thunder cloud of shaggy hair, wicked claws,
and gleaming teeth. He clutches Marvin's torso between wolf and
jaws and shakes him limp, no different than a hound
might shake a rabbit bonneless, except a hound could never

(04:59):
have been one of the three boyfriends. Selena drew to
the cabin. They were hers and each other's here for
a precious weekend of polyamorous hiking and cozying up by
the fire and fucking the life out of each other.
As Ted put it, he couldn't have known he'd be
the first to die. Frankie thrashes his head to one side,

(05:23):
muscles go taut down his lupine neck, and his teeth
unlatched from a still human torso. Marvin's body smashes through
the picture window and into the moon soaked outdoors. The
woods are strangely quiet, as if every creature that crawls,
walks and climbs can tell the wolf is awake. Tonight,

(05:45):
they're stuck with Selena and the kind of movie Ted
might have dragged her to back in Civilization, one she'd
love to walk out on, Except the tickets are purchased,
the popcorn is buttered, and Hollywood's already trapped her in
the dark. She'll have to see the horror show through
to the end. She charges into the living room while

(06:07):
Wolf Frankie's back is turned. Had she known what the
sudden shaggy patch on his arm meant earlier in the evening,
she might have fled with Ted and Marvin then, But
it's too late for them, and it's too late for Frankie.
His sharp ear twitches at the pounding footsteps and murder

(06:28):
crosses his wolfish eyes. A better prepared where Wolf would
have launched himself off the toppled sofa and torn Selina's
head clear off her shoulders in a crimson geyser, but
he isn't prepared, and Selena launches herself first, and her
omulet turn shive drives into the back of his neck

(06:49):
thanks b to her grandmother, Wolf Frankie deflates with a
thinning whine. His limbs thrash and slop, his snout flattens
it against his face, and his shaggy hair writhes in
a dying colony of wolf in worms. A warm breath
seeps from his shrinking form, and the silver shive clatters

(07:11):
beside him, blade caked in dark blood. It's over. Frankie
is himself, and yet he'll never be himself again. He's
instead gone from wolf Frankie to corpse Frankie, and sure,
as Ted and Marvin are gone, so is he. No

(07:33):
more of his once ceaseless curiosity what started this trouble
in the first place. No more of Ted's crude jokes
despite his being so shy in the bedroom. No more
of Marvin's sweet songs when they all piled together. They
had this final evening curled up by the fireplace, and
then hell found them. Selina wipes frantic hands down her face.

(07:59):
Too many tears and she won't be able to drive
Ted's truck out of here. And she needs to put
miles between herself and this cabin, these bodies, these woods.
She crosses the living room and grasps the front doorknob.
A thick gurgle fills the room, like wolf's breath bubbling
up a dead throat. Selina twists too fast on her heel,

(08:22):
shooting a painful tremor across one knee, and glances at Frankie.
Her silver shive lies gleaming and the fireplace's flicker. She
snatches it up and aims at the corpse, which will
surely pounce at any moment. Frankie's face remains still, no
animal hair, no claws, no stretching skull, drags his nose

(08:45):
and mouth into a fresh snout. He's dead. It's over,
or is it? Selena eyes her shive. She stabbed a
werewolf with silver. That should be enough. Hollywood's faster the
popular belief that only a silver bullet can kill a
werewolf but people must have been killing the damn thing

(09:06):
since before bullets were invented. Right, silver is silver, Selena whispers,
But if silver kills a werewolf, is that enough to
keep it dead? She's only watched a handful of werewolf
movies and zero sequels, but since when good movies help anyone?
Best to be sure, She crouches down and jabs the

(09:28):
shive into Frankie's side. Every part of her tenses for
his reaction. The sudden end of movie scare just before
the credit slam at the screen like a speeding car
full of suicidal crash test dummies. But Frankie doesn't flinch
when Selena twists the shive, or when she sticks his chest,

(09:49):
or when she jacks the shive across his neck in
a makeshift zipper line. He's dead for certain. She leaves
him again, shive in one and both wrists, blocking her ears.
She won't hear a sound until the cabin's front door thwacks,
its doorframe, bounces out and settles again behind her. But

(10:12):
do you know what sound you will hear again and
again and again and again and again unless you have
cooler zone media or you hit the forward fifteen second button,
I guess, and we're back. The night rushes in as

(10:40):
she crosses the porch, where a moonlit puddle might be
the beginning of Ted's blood trail to the shed. Its
edge is skewed by Frankie's paul prints beneath the picture
window glass glitters across a dark pile, Marvin lying and
mid fallen leaves. Selina listens for woodland creatures to bring

(11:01):
their comforting nocturnal chorus to the scene of skittering mice
through ferns and insects calling through the trees. An owl
warbles out an uncertain hoot, and a fox cries in
the underbrush. The prey are quiet, while the predators sing
of their moment. Selina hurries to Ted's truck and slides inside.

(11:24):
Back in the land of movies, this is when she
finds no keys and realizes Ted must have kept them
in his pocket, despite her telling him there's nobody in
the woods to steal his damn truck. She'll have to
follow his blood trail to the shed, and that's when
wolf Frankie, alive again, will crash through the door. Thought
it was over, didn't she? Except the keys sit in

(11:47):
the cup holder between the front seats, write where she
told Ted to put them This afternoon, she snatches them
up and sits behind the wheel. Time to kiss, key
to ignition, let the end and growl through the woods
and get the hell back to civilization. It really is
over now, or is it? That wolfish gurgling rises again?

(12:13):
Selena flinches against the steering wheel and the truck shouts
out a honk. How could Frankie have snuck into the
car with her? Can were wolves teleport? She's never heard
of a movie where it happens, But again, movies never
help anyone. There might be a Hollywood werewolf conspiracy, a

(12:34):
bunch of werewolf actors and werewolf technicians at the beck
and call of werewolf directors and werewolf producers using their
art to deceive the public on what this breed of
undead can really do. Or Selena might be paranoid. When
she glances over her seat, she finds no torn claws,

(12:56):
loose teeth, not even a tuft of shaggy hair, only
the expected plastic water bottle and half devoured bag of chips.
She can drive away and be done with all of this,
but the nightmare isn't done with her. Is it? What
if Frankie's still alive? She leaves the truck and creeps

(13:18):
back into the cabin where Frankie used to lie, where
she won't find him. There will be blood and hair,
but no dead boyfriend, Ted and Marvin aside, and when
she turns around, she'll find wolf as filled her world.
Except none of this happens. Frankie lies in a pool
of blood, some mix of his and Marvin's. It's over.

(13:41):
It really is, isn't it. Selina needs to be sure.
She marches outside, tries her best not to glance at
Marvin's glass littered body, Ted's blood trail shining with moonlight,
failing at both, and hauls up the wood cutting axe
from the stump by the porch. Isn't this in line

(14:04):
with the old ways? Wood cutter versus wolf, axe against beast.
She can't trust any Hollywood movie, but fairy tales have
been told across eons to caution everyone who hears them.
A fairy tale won't lead her astray. It instead leads
her back to the living room. Or She raises the axe,

(14:25):
lowers it by inches, raises it again, then squeezes her
eyes shut and heaves it down flesh snaps and bones
crack and corpse. Frankie loses an arm, no sign of
wolf in him, but she can't stop yet. Three limbs
and a head to go. The work is exhausting. Rise, chop, sweat, chop, cry, scream, cry, vomit, chop,

(14:57):
and so on. A clock waves its hea hands in
slow circles, begging for her attention, but it can't tell
her anything she doesn't already know. Time is another predator
in the night, the only one guaranteed to catch its
prey in the end. She should have escaped by now.

(15:17):
She will escape right. It's over and she should go
if there's anywhere left to run to. She's been coming
and going from this gore soaked living room for as
much time as passed earlier in this Nightmare, between Frankie
finding the tooth and wood idol and his moonlit transformation.

(15:38):
In those hours, the rest of the universe might have
collapsed into a black hole, and the only surviving bits
of matter and life are right here at this cabin
in these woods. One last movie in the world filled
with were wolves. But maybe Selena doesn't have to wait

(15:58):
for some pre credit stinger. Maybe whether the horror is
over or not has nothing to do with letting fate
crash to its final conclusion. Maybe it has everything to
do with choosing the best time to walk out of
the theater. Selena returns to the porch and her now
blistered hands drop the axe. Time to decide where the

(16:21):
lights go up? The sun will only rise if she
leaves this place. A gurgling wolf cough drags her stomping
back into the cabin. What now, she shrieks, What the
hell do you want? What will it take to make
you stop? I'm sorry I couldn't save you, I really am,

(16:43):
But I can't change it now. I can't. Only the
soft crackle of the fireplace answers her. The wolf noises
must be her imagination, some post traumatic stress symptom? Can
it be post traumatic when the traumas progress mid trauma? Then,
but just as insiduous as PTSD? Wolf Frankie is dead,

(17:07):
But now his wolf stalks Selina's mind, where he'll grunt
and growl and howl to the end of her days.
She reaches his chopped up body a visual promise that
he's dead. She'll let her hands play in the strewn
tendons and scrape the chopped bone. If that's what it
takes anything to make her mind understand, it's over. But

(17:33):
do you know what else will follow you around forever? Wait,
the ads don't follow you, they just follow me. Well,
I mean, the products and services are a cheerful companion
these days. But anyway, here they are, and we're back

(18:03):
because Frankie isn't chopped up anymore. Sticky puddles coat the
wood where Selena heaved the axe down on his limbs,
and axe driven grooves mar the floorboards, but there are
no loose tendons, muscles, bone. Frankie's torso is whole, his
head attached, as if striking him over and over with

(18:24):
the axe were as fictitious as a scene seen in
any movie. Sover Is Silver battles in Selena's mouth with
what the fuck? And all she can get out is
silver is fucked? Must a silver bullet really finish the job?
Nothing else will work? What did people do in olden

(18:45):
times when a werewolf came stalking their villages? Ask it
nicely to leave, sacrifice their children to sate its appetite,
or as modernity tainted myth and twisted folklore with new ideas,
with Hollywood's unhelp movies, erasing every ancient werewolf weakness, now
that everyone believes only a silver bullet can end the nightmare.

(19:09):
Selena doesn't have a silver bullet. She doesn't have a gun,
or a field guide to killing werewolves, or much hope.
But she believes Frankie's going to come back in all
his wolfish glory. She believes only she can stop him,
and she believes in spreading fire from the fireplace to

(19:29):
the curtains and furniture before she heads out the door.
She believes in burning this cabin to the fucking ground
with Frankie inside. The insistent blaze fills the smashed picture
window in front doorway. As she stumbles back to the truck,
red light brushes tender fingers through the trees a cautious twilight.

(19:52):
Wondering if the time has come for sunrise, Selena wants
to tell the world, yes, go ahead and let the
light eats up. At last, it's really over, or is it.
There's that wolfish gurgle again, and this time it breaks
into a howl. Serena drives her hands against her ears,

(20:16):
can't be hearing this, refuses it. The fire roars too
loud for her to block it out, and beyond its crackle,
she hears another howl. What if the problem isn't the
wolf or the silver Maybe the problem is her and
the trauma within, or the idol Frankie found, or whether

(20:39):
it infects people not by touch but by sitting in
their presence, biding its time against silver, axes and flame.
Her problem might even be math, she realizes, as firelight
and early morning luminescence reveal an absence and the fallen
leaves beneath the broken picture window. There's no dark lump

(21:04):
where Marvin should lie, only shattered glass. Selena throws herself
into Ted's truck and twists the key in the ignition.
Movie logic says, the engine won't start. Might even have
been savaged during Wolf Frankie's initial rampage. But movies are liars,
so who's to say. Who can ever really know if

(21:26):
the movie's over when you walk out of that dark room.
Maybe when the projectors shut down and the staff leaves,
the ghost of the movie keeps on plane itself, an
undead presence prowled by secret werewolves. The rear view mirror
spots the ongoing nightmare as Selena drives Ted's truck from

(21:47):
the cabin, where three werewolves pour from behind the inferno.
There's Frankie, his shaggy hair singed. There's Marvin, a dark
lump now flowing with muscle and claws. And between them
Skulk's head. No more crude jokes, only a cruel appetite

(22:08):
between his mishmash of sharp teeth, one claw clutches that
damn tooth and wood. Idol, he saved it from the fire,
his and Marvin's transformations, finishing out while they were dead
or undead or somewhere in between. That was never Frankie alone,

(22:28):
gurgling and howling, only a trio of werewolf still in
the works. And by Hollywood conspiracy or plain simple fact,
maybe only a silver bullet can really kill any of them.
The Idols made sure of it. They cling together and howl,
a polyamorous pack mourning a lost member. And then they

(22:50):
chase the truck to make their unit whole. Tongues flop
from jaws, and saliva flails and of faces and down necks.
They're almost an excited smattering of suburban neighborhood dogs chasing
a postal truck. Except this chase is for keeps. Selena
floors the gas and Ted's truck rushes up the dirt

(23:14):
road and through the woods. Dark branches scrape with toothy
sharpness at the windows the roof, as if a wind
full of wolves and circles the truck. But when Selina
glances to the rear view mirror again, only a cloud
of dust follows her tires, no claws or hair or

(23:35):
stretched out faces, no boyfriends turned wolves. They're still alive
back there, still wear wolves. But whether or not the
nightmare is over isn't about letting fate crash down on her.
She has to choose a time for the show to end,
a time to leave the theater and let the werewolves

(23:55):
play in their coils of ghost films. Only Selena can
decide if there should be a lingering question mark or
a bold and clear statement of the end. And she
has decided this is the finale. The road scrolling under
the truck's hood like a column of end credits. No

(24:17):
more horror show, no more nightmare. Even as she scratches
her arms where her fingernails snag on a strange new
clump shaggy hair, she promises herself, yes it is over, definitely,
forever entirely over. Or is it Denton Dun the end

(24:41):
of the story or is it the end of the story.
It is the end of the story as written, but
maybe the ghost of the story still lingers on. I
like a good short story that could mean so many
things depending on what you're feeling when you read it.
I mean, like, this isn't isn't a story about polyamory, right,
Like it happens to be that there's three boyfriends, right,
and they all fock each other a bunch. But that's

(25:02):
all before the story even starts. But also there's this
kind of like I don't know, like leaving boyfriends behind,
and like this sense that like these men who have
turned into monsters, which is a common but not always
experience of people who date men or anyone, anyone is
capable of being this way. You know, there's this like, oh,

(25:24):
trying to leave them behind in your rear view mirror,
but in a weird way, they're always coming after you.
I mean, I think, really it's a story about trauma
and never being able to leave it. But I also
like this stuff about how something has gone from folklore
to Hollywood, and so it's actually kind of in a
way talking about how something has gone from folklore to trope,

(25:47):
and kind of in some ways, folklore is tropes, right,
because folklore is often sort of the same story told
in different ways, passed on through various oral traditions, through
a game of telephone and people adding new things, and
what is that but trope. But it's like less conscious
and more earnest in a folklore context, and yet it's
become less so in the modern context. And so that's

(26:09):
what I was saying when I think a story that
plays with trope consciously and not just like I'm subverting
a trope, but like addressing that in really interesting ways.
Here's what Haley has to say about it at the
back of the anthology. For perspective's sake, I want to
share that I love a trope. I've gone looking at
character cliches and story been there, done that's, and I

(26:31):
start laughing and getting excited because they're wonderful. You can
make something incredible for most of them, they're so much fun.
So I wanted to take that enthusiasm and confront a trope.
I'm not a fan of the non ending of the end,
or is it often for me, it feels like a
cheat or sequel baiting, or a lack of perspective. But

(26:51):
when I thought deeper about it, beyond the implicit jump
scare lies a nightmare of endlessness. Paranoia lingers, trauma sticks,
and there's a sense of never really getting out of
a bad situation. I wanted to tackle the horror of
that non ending by stretching out the wound of that moment,
poking around at how far it could go and maybe

(27:12):
how cruelly it could cut. And then Hazel, who helps
me pick stories, said about this. I love how Haley
uses a trope that I'm also often annoyed by to
explore the viscerality of trauma. I've heard and I don't
know this is literally true, but it often feels that way.
That the amygdala, where fear and trauma are processed, doesn't

(27:34):
encode memories with time. So when you experience a memory,
it's really easy to feel like it's happening right now,
that you're still living in this story, and that's a
horror story, never being able to move on, still jumping
at shadows, perpetually needing to stay on edge to keep
yourself safe. This is Margaret again. My perspective again, I'm

(27:55):
really drawn to the prose of this story. Very specifically.
I was reading this essay and I didn't write this
into the script, so I don't have it in front
of me. I was reading this essay like a day
or two ago, written by an author talking about how
they don't love most prose and writing of the golden
age of science fiction with the exception of Ray Bradberry.

(28:17):
And in that piece they talk about how people kind
of came along and added writing really beautiful prose to
genre fiction at some point, and this is of course
an exaggeration on some level. But then that author again
whose name I don't remember, who wrote this essay that
I read a few days ago, goes in like list
contemporary authors who do it really, really well and specifically

(28:38):
names Haley Piper, And having just read this story by
Haley Piper, it really stuck out to me. There's ways
of doing prose that's beautiful without getting lost and like
I'm just going to beautifully describe all of these details
of things and getting kind of purple. But instead, there's
ways of doing beautiful prose that's moving the action along

(29:00):
and ties into the plot, and that's what I think.
Hailey is a master of these sentences that are like
becoming beautiful by cutting out words and taking abnormal structure.
But yeah, if you want to know more about Haley
p here's Haley's bio. Hailey Piper is the Bram Stoker

(29:21):
Award winning author of novels, short fiction, and nonfiction. She
is an active member of the Horror Writers Association and
lives with her wife in Maryland, where their paranormal research
is classified. Her new novel is A Game in Yellow,
and she has a short story collection out called Teenage
Girls Can Be Demons. You can find her at Haileypiper

(29:43):
dot com and Hailey, I mean it's in the title,
but it's h A I L E Y P I
p e r dot com. And I'm Margaret Kiljoy and
you can find me on the Internet by looking up
Margaret Kiljoy. I'm on Blue Sky and it st. I
hate social media with a desperate passion, but also recognize
it's the waters in which we swim. And I have

(30:06):
a substack Marter Kiljoy dot substock dot com where I
post my thoughts. And I also have another podcast called
cool People. It did cool stuff And thanks for listening.
All the way to the end of the podcast, because
it is the end, isn't it No, it actually is
the end. Okay bye. It could happen here as a

(30:27):
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
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