Red Moon is horror told effectively, through the street-level view of a series of homespun folk, each removed from being average Americans only by the ghastly werewolf-related events that pounce upon them. Teenager Patrick miraculously survives a werewolf attack at 30,000 feet, another teen, Claire, is hunted down by mysterious agents of the government, while at the head of the National Insecurity, The President of the United States is himself feeling rather, ‘ahem’, dogged.

The characters of Red Moon are separate people clearly bound on a collision course, in a world where lycanthropy is at once treated like a disease and a threat to Homeland Security. Using the feral and unpredictable nature of the werewolf makes for a strident take on modern America’s corn-fed anxiety about enemies foreign and domestic; painting a nation’s fears in blood and moonlight.

Percy’s prose is an exercise in impact; each sentence terse and precision-sculpted, so that it etches itself onto your imagination. Similes are deployed to emphasise the danger that lurks around the mundane, and everything in the world that Percy has created is approximated to something more threatening: seatbelts click like switchblades, stomachs are like balled fists.

The tone is oppressive, fuelled by a terse present-tense narrative that’s determined to get the job done and leaves little space for a laugh or smile, other than perhaps a grim smirk now and then. That can be wearying in long stretches, but then right from Page 1 everyone in Red Moon feels weary, so why shouldn’t the reader dive into the story and share in it?

Red Moon‘s film rights have already been bought up by the people behind The Spiderwick Chronicles, suggesting a big screen transmogrification on the horizon. But while the action, the grim geography, and the sloshing gore will transition seamlessly it’s difficult to see how the magnificent tension of the book will remain. All the more reason then to read it before Hollywood gets their claws into it.

Published on Thursday 9 May 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton.