The Curse of the Wendigo

The Curse of the Wendigo is a novel by Richard Yancey, published in 2010 and the second book of his Monstrumologist series, which is written as the recovered journal of a boy apprenticed to a monster hunter.

The year is 1888 and Will Henry is twelve, recording what happens around Dr. Warthrop, a New England scientist who studies monsters seriously enough to hunt them and methodically enough to disagree with other scholars about what they are. This time the quarry is the Wendigo, a creature that eats human flesh and starves even as it gorges, which makes it as much a puzzle as a threat. The search takes the doctor and his apprentice far from New England, into conditions where cold, hunger and the people around them are as dangerous as the thing they are tracking, and where their profession is not regarded as respectable by anybody with a reputation to protect.

Yancey writes in a gothic Victorian register with body horror at the centre of it, and the series is as interested in obsession and cruelty carried out in the name of science as it is in the monsters themselves.