Relatos Cortos - Hombres Lobos y Otras Bestias

by Victoria Robbins

«¡¡Hombre Lobo!!» Este grito viene profiriéndose desde el comienzo de los tiempos, cuando unos escasos seres humanos fueron obligados, quizá ocasionalmente, a vivir junto a los animales salvajes, con los que mantuvieron una relación a nivel de igualdad… ¡Pero como esta combinación de bestia sanguinaria y ser racional generó un monstruo, se dio pie a un mito que las leyendas han conservado hasta nuestros tiempos!
La literatura es el espejo ideal para reflejar el mito del Hombre Lobo o de la Mujer Loba, sobre todo cuando quienes manejan la pluma son unos creadores de atmósferas terroríficas, como les sucede a Manuel Yáñez y Frederick Marryat, con sus escalofriantes relatos Aullidos de libertad y Una narración de los Monte Hartz.
Sin embargo, también hay otras bestias aterradoras, algunas de ellas por sí mismas, como mostramos en El gato negro, de Edgar Allan Poe, en El gato de Brasil, de Arthur Conan Doyle, y en Sheebae, la reina de las serpientes, de Carter Scott.
Otras bestias adquieren un carácter inquietante, al convertirse en la proyección de los temores de unos seres humanos sumidos en la locura, lo que aparece en ¡Dejadme dormir con mi mujer!, de Victoria Robins, y en Una serpiente en el pecho, de Nathaniel Hawthorne.
En nuestra selección hay otros relatos, además de los mencionados, que aportan distintas variantes a la oferta de bestias extraordinarias, de pesadillas capaces de inquietar durante meses los sueños de quienes tengan el valor de atreverse a leer este libro. Por eso hemos de hacer esta advertencia: ¡¡No deben arriesgarse a leerlo las personas de corazón muy frágil!!
Contenido:
- Aullidos de libertad.
- El gato negro.
- ¡Dejadme dormir con mi mujer!
- Sheebae, la reina de las serpientes.
- Una narración de los montes Hartz.
- La corza blanca.
- Una serpiente en el pecho.
- La princesa tigre.
- El gato de Brasil.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories

191 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1997

Reviews

[Alex Raïs · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Originally read in Spanish]

Relatos de hombres lobos y otras bestias [Tales of Werewolves and Other Beasts] is a compilation of eight short stories: Aullidos de libertad [Howls of Freedom] by Manuel Yáñez Solana; The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe; ¡Dejadme dormir con mi mujer! [Let Me Sleep With My Wife!] by Victoria Robbins; Sheebae, la reina de las serpientes [Sheebae, Queen of the Snakes] by Carter Scott; The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains by Frederick Marryat; La corza blanca [The White Doe] by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer; La princesa tigre [The Tiger Princess] by Jean Ray; and The Brazilian Cat by Arthur Conan Doyle.

While the different short stories were good in general, I couldn't help but notice several editing, transcription and/or translation mistakes that at times took me out of the reading experience.

Aullidos de libertad: A story about a half-human, half-wolf, half-boar creature whose human parents keep prisoner for his entire life until, one night, he kills them and is finally free. I found the story to be mostly ok, but, as with most short story, I was left with questions. How did this creature come to be? Was he a genetic experiment? Was he born severely deformed? Was he the result of a curse? All we know is that the mother did give birth to him. That's it.

The Black Cat: I don't remember when was the last time I hated a character with such passion as I hated the protagonist of this story. Poe did a good job representing how despicable this guy is. However, I found the character's transformation too sudden and unbelievable: he goes from being a person who loves animals more than people to an abusive arsehole who enjoy inflicting pain on both his wife and his pets, specially his cat Pluto, whom he ends up hanging from a tree. I just don't get that sudden change. Still, one of the best if not the best story of the bunch.

¡Dejadme dormir con mi mujer!: This was meant to be an erotic story mixed with a pinch of horror and a spoonful of the supernatural. Here, a man is suffering because his wife (wait for it) has turned into a nymphomaniac because "she's possessed" and she's cheating on him every night!



Not only that: he even catches her having sex with a cat!



Then he straps her to a bed and let's her die. Afterwards, he digs her corpse up to sleep with her again.



I know fiction is meant to make you feel things, and feeling uncomfortable is one of the many emotions humans can go through. That's not my problem (for the love of God, I've read It). My problem is that I couldn't find any substance to this story other than some sort of attempt at shocking you. "Hey, look! A woman fucking a cat!" Good job, well done, what else?

Sheebae, la reina de las serpientes: Now here's a story I can get behind. A man witnesses how an African rock python crushes a lion to death and eats it, after which he becomes obsessed with the snake. He creates a whole habitat in his house's basement, captures one, and then starts to feed it people while he watches. The python eats the guy who caught the snake, the protagonist's cousin and other family members, even his own mother. After the snake eats a Scotland Yard detective, the protagonist is sure the police is going to come after him, so he commits suicide by offering himself to the python. Talk about a vore fetish.

The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains: This story starts reeeaaallyyy slow, but then gets interesting. It's also the only story of the book that we could say is about a werewolf proper. A man finds out his wife is cheating on him with a count, so he kills them both and runs away with his two sons and daughter to live in the mountains. One day he sees a white wolf, follows it to kill it, but instead finds a father and daughter who claim to be his cousin. They stay with the family for a bit and the daughter ends up marrying the man. The children notice how the woman gets out of the house every night, and when the eldest goes to check out what's happening, he's killed "by a wolf."

Long story short, the youngest daughter is also killed and the remaining one somehow convinces his father to follow him outside to see the woman eating the girl's corpse mid-transformation.

This one is actually not that bad once you get over the slow beginning. I do think is part of a bigger story, but I might be mistaken.

La corza blanca: This story has not aged well. Barely two pages in you already know what's going to happen in the end. A noble has a very beautiful and very white daughter whom he takes out to hunt. They hear the story of a shepherd that swears the deer in the area can talk and make fun of him, specially one white doe. Everybody laughs at him, and when the girl laughs, the shepherd swears he's hearing the white doe's laugh again. I think you can already tell where this is going, right?

One of the girl's servants, who's in love with her, wants to hunt the white doe to give it to her as a present. He finds the talking deer, kills the white doe and, surprise! It was the noble's daughter all along! Totally not expecting that, were we?

Not only is the story predictable, but I also take particular offence at the fact that the shepherd, who's said to be ignorant and stupid, is talking like a bloody aristocrat. I know this was a common thing in literature back in Bécquer's time, but it's one of my pet peeves and I can't help but hate it.

La princesa tigre: This one was interesting. It went in all directions and actually managed to take me by surprise.

A guy named Andy, who's going to be hired to work at a school, is contacted by a Scotland Yard detective who asks him to serve as his spy, since he believes something shady is going up in the school that strangely resembles the events that take place in a book Andy's written.

Andy tells the detective of the things that take place in the school via different letters, until one final letter in which he says he's going to check what goes on in the school's east wing, where a woman supposedly lives. Once in the east wing, Andy discovers that it's all decorated in imitation of a Hindu temple in the jungle. He finds out that the woman is the Tiger Princess from the book (which we discover he actually didn't write and instead stole from the Princess herself, ignorant of her identity). We're now treated to another of my pet peeve cliches: the rest of the teachers are there, serving the Princess, and, since they're going to kill him, they decide to explain their evil plan in all detail. Turns out the Princess loves human blood and she's feeding on the students. She then turns into a tiger and pounces on Andy.

Andy then wakes up. He's been having nightmares caused by the two books he's been reading: the Tiger Princess and another one about detectives.

This story was absolutely confusing, but in a good way. Excluding the evil monologue cliche, I'm rather pleased with it.

The Brazilian Cat: Kind of meh, kind of not good nor bad, the story was rather mediocre for my liking.

A man is living almost in poverty while he waits for his uncle to die and pass his inheritance and title onto him. In the mean time, he visits a cousin of his who's been to Brazil a lot and has brought several exotic animals with him, including a Brazilian cat, which is kind of like a black panther. He plans on asking his cousin for money, and when he finally does, his cousin locks him up with the cat to be killed. He manages to survive the night and, when the cousin comes to see what's left of him, he's attacked by the cat and killed.

When the protagonist gets back to full health more than a month later, he's told that his uncle died about the time he was in his cousin's house, so now he's rich at last and with a title. Since the cousin was second in the line of succession, it's implied that he wanted to get the money and title for himself.

Honestly? I didn't get much from this story. It's not badly written, but it didn't fascinate me. As I've already said, it's rather mediocre.

Overall, there're good, bad and mediocre stories in this book. I don't feel like I could give it more than three stars.

Final score: 5 out of 10 wolves that may or may not be werewolves.

[Octavio Villalpando · Rating 3 out of 5]

Como muchas antologías, esta resulta un tanto irregular en su resultado final, sin embargo, tiene algunos relatos interesantes.

El problema es que al anunciarse principalmente como "de hombres lobo" da una idea errónea de su contenido, más bien se trata de un libro acerca de "otras bestias y hombres lobos", de ahí que la inclusión de relatos como el famoso "Gato negro" de Poe sea más que justificada, así como la de otros seres como serpientes, tigres u otros felinos, pero de hombres lobo, no tiene mucho que digamos.

Resultará entretenido para aquellos que busquen relatos acerca de bestias no tan ordinarias, pues muestra algunas posibilidades no tan exploradas en la literatura relacionada con el tema, pero si se va con la idea de que es tan solo acerca de licántropos, puede resultar decepcionante.

Otro tema es que, a la par de escritores como Conan Doyle, Poe o Jean Rey, también se incluyen algunos otros autores que no están precisamente al nivel, lo que resulta en un cierto desbalance en cuanto a la calidad de las historias, pero como de costumbre, eso es algo que puede esperarse siempre en este tipo de trabajos. Al menos es de lectura rápida, así que servirá muy bien para matar algunas horas de un día particularmente ocioso.

[Diego Ruiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fue una lectura amena, una que otra historia salida de tono y de poco interés, pero también hubo más de una historia rescatable, siendo predominante el gato negro de Edgar Allan Poe, una narración de los montes de Hartz de Frederick Marryat, la princesa tigre de Jean Ray y el gato de Brasil de Arthur Conan Doyle.
Particularmente fue un libro como para despertar en interés por las criaturas, ciertamente solo una de sus historias se centra en los hombres lobo, pero si hay varias historias que usan el concepto de teriantropía como su tema central, lo cual va muy de la mano con la licantropía y brindaban razón a la recopilación de relatos con ese título.
La mayoría de las historias eran un poco previsibles, pero aún así no quitaban la intriga del orden de los sucesos y en cambio si añadían emoción para continuar la lectura.
En cuanto a la edición, realmente deja mucho que desear, demasiados errores que evidencia su falta de revisión.
Pero en general no estuvo mal, disfrute su lectura y me aportó momentos de intriga y suspenso que convergierón en pasarla bien.

[Loreto · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pongo un 2 por los relatos de Doyle y de Poe, el resto no me han gustado nada y uno de ellos me parece repulsivo, si os lo habéis leído supongo que sabréis a cual me refiero. Mala elección de relatos.

[Aída Alonso Peral · Rating 1 out of 5]

No me han gustado los relatos. Han sido interesantes pero no dan emoción a la lectura. Frustra porque me habría gustado que me incitasen a leer más historias de este tipo. Un poco decepcionada.
Posdata: hay un relato repulsivo y lo que es peor, no le pillo la gracia ni es bueno.

[Gary Franco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sólo un relato habla sobre hombres lobo, eso me decepcionó un poco (imaginé que encontraría un relato de licántropos no conocido de la pluma de Poe y no fue así)

[Carmen Rodriguez · Rating 2 out of 5]

La verdad pense que iba a tener mas historias de licantropos, no me gusto mucho la selección , es como mucho de animales y cambia formas, pero lo senti disperso.... Entretiene pero hasta alli

[Irene Lázaro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Las colecciones de relatos de varios autores siempre son difíciles de puntuar porque siempre hay relatos que te gustan mucho más que otros. En general la selección de historias me ha gustado, destacando el relato de Sheebae, la reina de las serpientes que para mí ha sido 5/5 estrellas.

[Gissel Arvizu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mi primer libro de terror y el unico la unica historia pasable es la del gato negro de edgar allan poe :)

[Emilse Selene · Rating 2 out of 5]

las únicas buenas historias son las dos primeras, de ahí solo hay historias muy flojas que no causan ninguna emoción , son simples.