Book 48 Wolf Flow

 

Wolf Flow by KW Jeter fulfilled the category “Book with a Palindromic Title” for the PopSugar 2022 Reading Challenge. A palindrome is a phrase that reads the same forward and backward. For example, Taco Cat, Party Trap, and Wolf Flow.

This was not my favorite category. Titles were tough to come by. My husband shooed me away from Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. He didn’t think I’d enjoy it as the ending was a little ridiculous. He knows how stabby I get with bad endings. I had a few others on the list, but nothing caught my eye. I grabbed Wolf Flow in paper and slogged through.

The story starts with a body dump. That caught my attention. Especially since the body wasn’t dead yet. Mike, a doctor selling drugs on the side, is dumped in the desert and left to die. Luckily, a good Samaritan trucker stops and takes him somewhere to recover. Mike refuses medical attention, though his injuries are severe. The trucker places him in a deserted health spa and leaves him. That intrigued me, living near Saratoga Springs and all the history behind the springs. The spa is an abandoned building, but nothing to help our Mike.

Or is there?

Mike has a series of vivid dreams featuring the spa in its heyday. The dreams are so real, Mike thinks there’s something more. What follows is an odd flow of story about Mike trying to survive, the trucker’s son trying to help him, Mike’s girlfriend coming to the rescue, and the bad guys trying to end Mike.

I had no idea what I was reading. It seemed like a survival story, then maybe gangsters/mafia, then a redemption story. But none of those categories fit.

The book was published in 1992. By the time I got to the end, the genre clicked. This title is an 80s/90s slasher film, I mean, novel. It’s written in the mode of Stephen King with odd characters, no real hero, and horrific, fantastic events. Recently, I watched Event Horizon (1997) with Hubby, and the genre of Wolf Flow finally became clear. We didn’t have the element of space, but we did have a slow build to gruesome events. The cheese factor for both was high.

So, spoiler, the water from the spa was transformative. It could heal almost any injury, but it drove the drinker mad. And not just any kind of mad. The drinker wanted to do sick experiments on people. They used the water to heal their “patients” from vivisection and other operations and push the human body beyond its limits.

Blood and gore filled the last chapters of the book, and all the empathy I had for Mike died quickly. I don’t like books with no hero or person to root for. I don’t love books where the protagonist ends up the villain for no other reason than bad choices and circumstances. But there’s no way I’m reading another palindromic title before the end of the month. so…

I give Wolf Flow by KW Jeter Three Bottles of Magic Water and a warning to NOT drink them.