A WEREWOLF IN RIVERDALE – Caleb Roehrig

If you’ve seen the new Archie Comics series on Netflix (or some other streaming service) you know that the new Archie and Riverdale gang are almost nothing like the Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica that most of us grew up with.

Someone is killing the citizens of Riverdale. Dilton Doily is one of the first to die and when Jughead wakes up the following morning, with blood on his clothes and a strange dream about meeting Dilton in the graveyard the night he was killed, Jughead has a bad feeling that he just might be the cause.

As tensions rise, Archie’s worried about his friend Betty who has said some suspicious things, and disappears at odd hours. When he follows her one night he learns that Betty is a descendant of a long line of werewolf hunters. Betty’s aunt (and trainer) thinks that Archie isn’t worth training (to fight werewolves) but Betty convinces her that the extra help would prove useful, and so Archie gets some important lessons in the history and anthropology of werewolves, as well as some serious training on how to combat them. But if Archie’s best friend, Jughead, turns out to be the Riverdale monster, will he be able to put him down?

As I enjoy a good horror novel, and paranormal creatures of all sorts (vampires, werewolves, mermaids, etc) are often fun to read about, I really did enjoy this book. It was certainly an added treat that I was familiar with both the classic Archie gang as well as the newer series. I was surprised to see regular characters (Dilton, as well as a few others – but I won’t say who they are) killed off and I wonder how that will play out in future books in the series (this is considered book #1 in the Archie horror series). This feels like a true stand-alone book. Characters and situations that were fun to read about once don’t strike me as something sustainable.

This is targeted toward the YA market, but definitely the more mature readers. This type of horror is much more graphic than, say, the old Goosebumps series.

Looking for a good book? A Werewolf in Riverdale by Caleb Roehrig is the first book in the Archie Horror book series. It’s gritty and complicated, but fun for those who enjoy the horror genre.