In a Cardiff pub, a woman of twenty-eight orders an ale she has never tasted. She has never tasted any alcohol at all, because her mother told her not to and her mother was right about what happened to maids who drank. She takes one mouthful, coughs hard enough that the next table turns to look, announces that it is foul, and then drinks the entire glass. Then she asks for brandy. She is not being reckless. She has just been handed a life, at twenty-eight, and she is finding out what is in it. The Wolf Queen’s Curse by Kaylee Archer is a novel about werewolves conquering one another, and its finest passage is a woman learning that she does not much like beer.
The Cousin The Wolf Queen’s Curse Puts to Work
Ann Stockwell was the Alpha’s granddaughter until she was nine. Then her grandfather died, her uncle took over, and she and her mother were sent belowstairs, where they stayed for nineteen years. The novel that precedes this one freed her. This one asks the harder question: freed into what?
She turns up at a train station with a carpetbag, having worked out how to buy a ticket by watching other passengers and getting it wrong twice. She has not left the estate since she was nine. When somebody asks where she would like to eat, panic crosses her face, because she has no idea what a restaurant is for. The Wolf Queen’s Curse by Kaylee Archer is unusually alert to the shape of that damage. It is not fear or trauma in the usual novelistic sense. It is a woman who has been kept from ordinary competence and now has to acquire it in public, in front of people who knew her when she was small.
Her refusal of pity is the spine of it. She tells her cousin flatly that she will not have it, and when an old family friend reappears and starts teasing her about her dowdy dress the way he teased her at nine, she goes to tell him the truth herself rather than let him find out sideways. That she is drunk when she does it, and that she vomits into his lap before she gets a word out, is exactly the right joke: the book will not let her have a dignified confession, because she has not been permitted enough practice at anything to be dignified yet.
The Power She Does Not Know She Has
There is a second thread underneath The Wolf Queen’s Curse by Kaylee Archer, and it is the more interesting one. Ann is a necromancer. In a basement with a dirt floor she summons three murdered men in a few minutes each, with no ritual objects and no incantation, because that is how her mother and grandmother taught her: concentrate very hard.
Nobody has ever told her this is extraordinary. She has known exactly one supernatural community, a werewolf Pack, in which her ability was a thing that made people flinch. When two people who do know better react with astonishment, she assumes she is being mocked. It is a small, sharp piece of writing about what happens to a talent raised in isolation, and it pays off late, when a very powerful woman looks at Ann and visibly recalculates.
The scene in that basement also does the plot’s dirty work efficiently. Three graves, three dead men, three accounts that agree. A ghost who is rude and wants paying, a boy of eighteen who is mostly confused about being dead, and a man still incandescent about a promise nobody kept. It is the cleanest sequence in the book and it belongs entirely to the character everyone keeps calling a lady’s maid.
The Women Nobody Names
The third Pack keeps five young women in the house, and when the heroine asks their names she is told that three of them do not matter. That line, delivered by another woman, is the book at its most unsentimental.
The Wolf Queen’s Curse by Kaylee Archer is clear-eyed about the arrangement. These are women who arrived from the worst end of the trade and traded up: a roof, a meal, one set of men instead of a street, some light housework. It is better and it is still ownership, and the novel resists both the impulse to rescue them and the impulse to look away. It knows how short their earning years are. And it knows why a woman of twenty-two would think a Pack was a retirement plan. The Victorian figure of the fallen woman usually exists in fiction of this period to be pitied or punished, and Hanora, who is the one who does the naming, gets to be neither.
She is also the book’s most interesting antagonist, which the story only half admits. She drugs two women, attempts a seduction that was meant to end in a killing, insults the heroine’s body with real venom, and then, having been caught, passes on the one clue that unravels everything, in Latin, from a line in Treasure Island, because she cannot be seen to have said anything. Afterwards she is beaten for it, off the page, by the man who ordered it. The heroine works out that she cannot help her without risking the alliance, decides not to, and is honest with herself about what that decision is. Ruthlessness in service of the people you have promised to protect, the book argues, is still ruthlessness, and it costs somebody.
Where The Wolf Queen’s Curse Loses the Thread
Four things weigh The Wolf Queen’s Curse by Kaylee Archer down.
- The structure is a circuit. Arrive, be insulted by a host, negotiate in bad faith, depart. Three times, in order, each stop signposted well before you reach it.
- The bedroom chapters crowd out the plot. They are well written and there are far too many, several covering ground already covered.
- The treacherous second-in-command declares himself early. A character marked as dangerous from his first scene turns out to be dangerous, and the basement merely confirms it.
- The last chapter is a trapdoor. A reversal arrives in four pages, undoes the victory the whole book has been building, and stops. Anyone who wants a complete story should wait for the next one.
Readers who want the register of The Wolf Queen’s Curse by Kaylee Archer with the temperature dropped should try Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito, which is far nastier about a woman in service. How to Help a Hungry Werewolf by Charlotte Stein handles the werewolf romance with the same seriousness about consent and a fraction of the politics. And Witch of the Wolves is not optional: a three-page recap opens this book, but the griefs it refers to were earned there. On content, the novel is graphically explicit throughout, and includes drugging, the beating of women, coerced servitude, a forced marriage arranged for breeding, and several murders.
Final Thoughts
Near the end, a woman who has spent the whole novel proving she is more than an ornament wins a fight nobody expected her to win, and her husband starts to announce it to a hall full of werewolves. She squeezes his hand and stops him, because saying it aloud would humiliate the man she just beat in front of his own Pack, and she has decided that she does not need the room to know. It is a good scene, and it is doing something the genre rarely does: treating restraint as a form of power rather than a failure of nerve. The Wolf Queen’s Curse by Kaylee Archer will be remembered by most readers for its Alphas and its cliffhanger. What it will actually be worth rereading for is quieter. A cousin ordering her first drink. A necromancer who thinks everyone can do what she does. Five women in a farmhouse, three of whom are not permitted names, and a novel that counts them anyway.