John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, which was fitting, as he was a towering giant of Twentieth Century American literature. Among other novels, he wrote Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. These works, and others by Steinbeck, are widely read and studied. What is not widely read is his unpublished 1930 werewolf novel Murder at Full Moon.
That's because the Steinbeck literary estate has kept it hidden in the archives of University of Texas. Dr. Gavin Jones of Stanford University described this novel and argues for its publication in The Guardian:
Set in a fictional Californian coastal town, Murder at Full Moon tells the story of a community gripped by fear after a series of gruesome murders takes place under a full moon. Investigators fear that a supernatural monster has emerged from the nearby marshes. Its characters include a cub reporter, a mysterious man who runs a local gun club and an eccentric amateur sleuth who sets out to solve the crime using techniques based on his obsession with pulp detective fiction.
The typescript even has two illustrations by Steinbeck. They depict the floorplan of the building where the murders took place, including the victims’ bodies. In the book, these are drawings made by one of the characters trying to solve the murders.
Jones described it as a world away from Steinbeck’s realist representations of the Great Depression, which may explain why he wrote this one under a pen name, Peter Pym. “Even though it is very different from Steinbeck’s other work, in a totally different genre, it actually relates to his interest in violent human transformation – the kind of human-animal connection that you find all over his work; his interest in mob violence and how humans are capable of other states of being, including particularly violent murderers.
-via Slate | Photo: Sonya Noskowiack