A review by rbreade
Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories by Michael Chabon

This is a reread of one of my favorite collections by one of my favorite writers. Each story offers some array of pleasures--Chabon has always had a gift for arresting images and metaphors--but the title story is the one I love best for how it combines some of Chabon's many interests--specifically, in this case, science, science fiction, comics, friendship, and family--into a complex, absorbing story. From the moment the story opens in a playground ditch, where narrator Paul Kovel is creating an Imperial Formic Highway for his Empire of the Ants, while up on the playground blacktop his friend, Timothy Stokes, is terrorizing their fellow fifth-graders as an ersatz werewolf, Chabon exhibits pitch-perfect control over his narrative.