A review by seano312
The Sea Wolf by Jack London

5.0

I thought this was a really good story of a fantastic villain.

Two things I wanted to do with this book:

1. I wanted to figure out if every crew member of "The Ghost" was named. London tells you how many sailors there are, and names a lot of them, but I kept wondering if, like the Right Fielder in the Abbott & Costello routine "Who's on First," any of them went unnamed.

2. The story takes a hard turn around 2/3rds of the way through and it becomes less of a "grotesque crew on a sailing vessel" but more of a straight up "castaway story." And I have a love/hate relationship to castaway stories. Fortunately this one wasn't a bad one.

Wolf Larson is a terror: an amoral beast that the protagonist is fascinated with. There are times where it is almost embarrassingly homoerotic. I think London knew that, which is why he threw in a female to keep the plot moving.

A really good sea story.