The Werewolf's Revenge [Mass Market Paperback]

This book has it all. If you like shapeshifters, demons, vampires and other mythical beasts then you will want to read this book. Lots of action and humor. This was the first book of this authors work that I have read and I want to read the others.

Richard Jaccoma writes of werewolves 40 years ago.
He has heroes and villains I can root for and hate.
The final battle was in fact a battle that shaped
history.

Jaccoma mixes fantasy and human history.
Read this book!
tom karlson

Richard Jaccoma's writing has continued to improve, to the point that for once I genuinely enjoyed one of his books from start to finish, the only significant sour note sounded turning out to be a clever case of misdirection. Characters are more fully rounded and fallibly human, including both the formerly human and the only human appearing. No longer are they just clunky stereotypes standing in for Mr. Jaccoma's prejudices. In particular I noted that the very same Chou en Shu who spent so many pages boasting of his genius in the first book was now humbly admitting to having been "almost entirely unsuccessful" when he recounted those efforts in this book. Mr. Jaccoma even allows his hero (and thus the reader) to feel brief twinges of pity for some of the lesser Nazis so cruelly massacred herein, and his Communist sympathies (there is no other word for them) are less in evidence than ever before.

So does this mean I am finally prepared to recommend a Richard Jaccoma novel? Unfortunately, no.

First of all, as the windup to what amounts to a trilogy, The Werewolf's Revenge cannot really stand alone. To his credit, Mr. Jaccoma puts a lot of effort into retelling the most significant parts of "Yellow Peril": The Adventures of Sir John Weymouth-Smythe and The Werewolf's Tale so that a reader need not have read them in order to grasp the gist of what is going on, but if he enjoys this book (and frankly only a "he" is likely to), he will no doubt seek out the earlier books...

and be disappointed by them.

Second, to my considerable annoyance, the author has submitted Yet Another rewrite. Apparently Richard Jaccoma has exactly one story to tell, and he's bound and determined to keep telling it over and over. Once again demonically influenced Nazis are chasing after a magical whatsit of unimaginable power, once again naive but noble heroes must struggle against impossible odds and traitors within their ranks only to fail at the end, and once again victory will be snatched from defeat by a secret plan hatched by the Old Guys and kept from the Noble Heroes because they couldn't have kept it secret or played their parts correctly if they'd known.

Third, since this third go at it is also intended to provide the endings completely missing from The Werewolf's Tale or largely skipped over in "Yellow Peril": The Adventures of Sir John Weymouth-Smythe, the two previous attempts, the result is two or in some cases three different characters playing the same role. Fortunately, Mr. Jaccoma has the sense to keep multiple versions of the same character from occupying the stage together for long, and for the most part he wisely pushes the more stereotypical characters from the first book into the background, but the novel definitely feels overcrowded with all these multiple versions of the same characters stumbling over each other.

In the end I just cannot recommend this pretty good ending to a pretty bad trilogy.

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