The boredom of Brian, a werewolf but, above all, a misunderstood soul

Grindr seems capable of keeping just one promise, and always: boredom. Life in the age of Grindr for a young gay werewolf is both tedious and depressing. It is as though digital society, with its obsession with fulfilling every unsolicited promise—driven by the anxiety to make users happy and to guarantee every comfort to anyone with a sofa and a screen—has forgotten not only how to shape myths, but also how to deal with them. From the myth of Lycaon to Saint Patrick, from Abruzzo on 25 December to John Landis’s New York, never has a werewolf been seen so at a loss as in Tony Santerella’s novel, "The Boring Life of a Gay Werewolf" (Fandango, translated by Ersilia Rappazzo). Brian drags his life along as a waiter in a diner after dropping out of college out of sheer exhaustion. Isolated by his own difference—which even he refuses to accept—Brian spends interminable days caught between drunken soliloquies and constant embarrassments caused by his condition as a werewolf. Then, as in the best fairy tales, he seems to meet his Prince Charming—yet another digital entrepreneur who is a bit mad, a bit of a visionary (as they always say) and, of course, very rich, with a remarkable ability to turn trivial ideas into highly profitable businesses. The idea is to set up a start-up – nothing out of the ordinary so far – but one dedicated to self-help for werewolves. This venture could help Brian reassemble his difficult life and perhaps even enable him to curb the outbursts of repressed rage that claim several victims from one night to the next. After all, as we know, lycanthropy is essentially a nervous condition.

Tony Santorella, born and raised in Danvers – the very heartland of witch hunts, where the Salem witch trials took place in 1692 – succeeds in combining two diametrically opposed emotions: irony and terror. To put it another way, Santorella bridges the 1990s with the present day, revealing to us the staggering transformation of those who once took pleasure in inventing things like the PlayStation and Tetris, and who today – still dressed poorly, but in black – are shaping massive economic conglomerates with the sole aim of exploiting the entire globe. The stated goal is to obtain the secret of eternal life, but this objective becomes secondary when pursued by individuals leading profoundly unfulfilling lives. In a sense, it is as if our older brothers had stopped letting us play so they could unleash a war upon us—not so much to exterminate us, but to torture us. "La vita noiosa di un lupo mannaro gay" is a light-hearted and extremely ironic book, but only because the theme at the heart of the novel is one of profound loneliness. It is the tale of a pain so difficult to bear that it can only be expressed, time and again, through a joke. Being a werewolf means belonging both to a pack and, above all, to one’s own solitude. Werewolves are the rejected, misunderstood and despised children. Partly men and partly wolves, cast out for their mistakes and then ridiculed for their poor results at school and, of course, for their perpetually ill-fated romances – some of which, incidentally, were merely dreamt of, whilst others were lost, probably forever.

A coming-of-age novel set in an era when nobody ever grows beyond adolescence, but in which perhaps it falls to gay werewolves, of all people, to grow up: ‘This is the day he’ll become a proper adult,’ he tells himself as he basks in the sun. ‘The day he’ll finally buy some curtains.’ The day when, having cast aside their childish ferocity, the wolves return to play.