Lila The Werewolf was first printed as a chapbook in New York in 1974. (See its beautiful cover here.) I read it as part of the Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, edited by Tom Shippey. It’s the story of a New Yorker named Farrell who comes to realize that his girlfriend is a werewolf. One thing that’s funny is how casual and urban and early ’70s the story is — as you read it’s impossible not to picture everyone dressed in droopy brown corduroys, moving into each other’s apartments with a suitcase and talking like extras in Sleeper-era Woody Allen. When Farrell first learns about the werewolf thing he’s apathetic and only gradually stirred to action. When he tells a friend about Lila, the guy responds, “I told you about Bronx girls.”

The knockout, though, is the prose, which reminded me a lot of Pynchon, dreamlike but muscular. Here’s a sample, as Farrell chases Lila in werewolf form in the night, attempting to find her before the building super, whose dog she’s killed, does:

Lila’s voice would come sailing to them then, from up in Harlem or away near Lincoln Center, and the little man would whirl and dash down into the earth, disappearing into the crack between two slabs of sidewalk. Farrell understood quite clearly that the superintendent was hunting Lila underground, using the keys that only superintendents have to take elevators down to the black sub-sub-basements, far below the bicycle rooms and the wet, shaking laundry rooms, and below the furnace rooms, below the passages walled with electricity meters and roofed with burly steam pipes; down to the realms where the great dim water mains roll like whales, and the gas lines hump and preen, down where the roots of the apartment houses fade together, and so along under the city, scrabbling through secret ways with silver bullets, and his keys rapping against the piece of wood. He never saw Lila, but he was never very far behind her.