Leaving the Pack by David O'Brien - pheromones and casual sex, and last excerpt today

 

Nobody believes in werewolves.

That's just what Paul McHew and his friends are counting on.

They and their kind roam our city streets: a race of people from whom the terrible legend stems; now living among us invisibly after centuries of persecution through fear and ignorance. Superficially Caucasian but physiologically very different, with lunar rhythms so strong that during the three days of the full moon they are almost completely controlled by their hormonal instincts, you might have cursed them as just another group of brawling youths or drunken gang-bangers. Now at the point of extinction, if they are to survive their existence must remain restricted to mere stories and legend, but, paradoxically, they also must marry outside their society in order to persist.

The responsibility for negotiating this knife-edge is given to Paul, who runs the streets with his friends during the full moon, keeping them out of real trouble and its resultant difficult questions. Having succeeded for years, he finds his real test of leadership comes when he meets Susan, a potential life-mate, to whom he will have to reveal his true identity if he is ever to leave his pack. 

The male characters, the werewolves, in Leaving the Pack have sex with a lot of strangers. It's best just to get that out there. They are the ultimate pick-up artists. They roam the city for two reasons: to expend energy, and to find girls. Of course, ultimately, they're looking for mates, relationships, wives. But they're in no hurry.

So how are they so successful? Pheromones. 

There are many types of pheromones in nature, and most of them usually involve sex - getting it and making it worthwhile (from an evolutionary perspective). From chemicals that direct male moths towards receptive females, to the molecules that make female mice sexually receptive in the presence of a strange male (including causing pretty drastic changes in her reproductive cycle), these substances can take over animals' behaviour and make them act differently to how they would if they never smelt them.  

 As a zoologist, the physiology of attraction has always interested me: from the first explanation of animal behaviour and experiments using photos of handsome people and cloths soaked in sweat, to my days spent in the field, videotaping deer mating in harems. The successful bucks seemed to only get more successful, as does selected the same ones the other females had, milling around and waiting their turn.

That image might not turn everyone on - it doesn't turn me on - but it is intriguing. I wonder what would happen if we could separate that buck, bring him to another group of does who hadn't watched the previous matings. Would he still be attractive? What exactly are the does attracted to in joining his harem?

The step of translating such animal studies to humans has been taken and research is ongoing. It makes for fascinating reading, but just one example will suffice here: photos of men are voted sexier if the voter is told that 80% of previous respondents consider the man handsome rather than just 20%.

But if you meet that man in a bar, how do you know that 80% of women consider him handsome?

As I learned on facebook recently (who says Facebook can't be educational, as long as you friend learned folk?) Freud said, "How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved."

Confidence. That's what's sexy. At least, that's what everybody says, and dating experts are making money talking about it and teaching people (read men) to emanate confidence.

Doubtless you can relate to this (irrespective of your views on deer). We've all had experience of it: a run of just not getting any action and then suddenly after you find someone, there are potential partners crawling out of the woodwork looking for a date.

A friend of mine used to call it a purple patch, when you just can't go wrong in seducing any object of affection.

So how is this confidence projected? Is it in your mannerisms, your body language, your demeanour, the tenor of your voice? Or is it in your smell?

Dogs (read wolves) and other animals can smell fear. If they can smell fear, then they can smell the opposite of fear, which is confidence. If they can it's because we release such a chemical. And if we release it, why would evolution not have our own species capable of picking it up?

Is confidence perhaps just the absence of some kind of fear scent? Doubtful. While people are probably able to perceive fear as well as confidence, not being afraid is our default and thus not very sexy, while confidence is. There must be some separate substance produced, perhaps stimulated by successive conquests - not just having sex with one's regular partner. This could be why it has been so difficult to find and isolate the chemical (there are people trying). Its production is probably erratic.

Not so with the pack.

Inventing a race of werewolves allowed me free range to imagine what the scientists might find in the future. The members of the pack are infinitely sexy and have confidence in buckets, because they produce this pheromone during the full moon without even thinking about it. They're not infallible, of course. They still have to be charming, still have to seduce the objects of their affection. It's also a potential double-edged sword. Apart from the fact that if they're ever discovered, they might be milked for their pheromones like bears farmed for their bile, more immediately, not only do they have their own aggression to control, but they also often disgruntle other men in the city by attracting their girlfriends. This can make war go hand in hand with love.

The pack wield this power they have relatively benignly. They treat their ladies with respect - they don't want a lot of irate women hating them. They're powerful men, but hell hath no fury... as the saying goes. And they stay away from married women. They're very family-orientated, for all their casual sex. They don't wish to damage any long-term relationships by making a spouse guilty when she'd really less control over her actions than she realised.

We don't see so much from the ladies' point of view, except Susan's, when she first meets Paul during a full moon. She's ready to do things she'd never before contemplated (there's an excerpt of this scene below), but later, when they meet again after the moon, Paul has to prove himself just as seductive, without the aid of what he calls his "little chemical friends."

 

 Excerpt

“Ehmm... I was wondering if you would like to dance with me,” he asked, gazing at the floor as he spoke and then fixing her with a stare that made her heart quicken and a reply out of her mind's reach.

‘Yes, please!’ a voice yelled inside her. Nevertheless, she knew full well by now that he was playing with her, and that the game consisted in not making things too easy for this stranger who was clearly accustomed to getting what he wanted. She had the will to resist her heart's demands, if only for a few more moments. Fixing him with an expression that said yes, her voice eventually replied, “But it's not even a slow song.”

As she said it, however, the music changed tempo to Madonna's ballad: Live to Tell. Couples began to form as the lyrics began. Susan acknowledged that she was caught. Still she paused for some time, scrutinizing him as though trying to peer inside him, before she conceded.

“OK,” she nodded with a smirk.

He smiled wryly and she put her arms around him, considering how he had manipulated her from the beginning. They danced for what seemed hours to Susan, as she clung to this beautiful man and let herself drift away, getting lost in his fragrance. It brought images to her mind of summer days in woods, raw sex in a meadow, the slight scent of wildflowers and crushed stems, encapsulated in a ring flattened by bodies rolling on the rough ground, cushioned only by the grass, feeling its texture on bare skin, the sun pouring into the circle past its borders of seed heads and the sound of bees.

She wondered about him calling her ‘sex.’ About to ask whether he had been for real or just taking the piss, she decided it didn’t matter. She thought that the word, the plain truth, was much more suited to him, and realized why she was so reluctant to give in easily to his request for a dance. It was not just a dance she had agreed to. This was not a normal situation, where she could get to know someone during the night and decide later if she would take it further. She had already crossed that line and knew that she would end up having sex with him that night. They would leave the bar and go to his place, or her place, or his car, or the alley around the side of the building – it did not matter – and she would have sex like she’d never had before.

Clinging to him now, she could arouse no resistance to the idea. In fact, she was ready to do whatever they would do, right then. She felt no need to know any more about him. His nearness and his smell were enough to make her want to leave immediately and let him do what he willed with her body.

“What’s your name? Or is it really: 'Interested'?”

She blushed again and replied, asking his before remembering that he had told her already. His name did not matter to her, either. It was superfluous information, now that he held her in his arms. He grinned, showing that he knew she had only asked him automatically.

“Well, I don't seem to have made much of an impression on you, if it takes three times for you to remember my name!”

“Yes, I'm sorry. It's Paul, isn't it?” she said, staring into his eyes for the first time since they’d begun dancing. They were so dark they seemed to be hiding in the shadows. She could not read what he was thinking - a thing she could often do - but sensed he held a secret behind those ebony orbs. Then she realized that she had been scrutinizing him for a long time and looked away.

“What are you thinking?”

“Nothing much,” she replied, searching for an answer. “Just wondering how long it is going to be before you make a pass at me.”

“I won't need to,” he whispered in her ear.

  

 

Links

David JM O'Brien's website

Leaving the Pack

Tirgearr Publishing

David JM O'Brien on Facebook

10% of the author's royalties will be donated to WWF, the World Wildlife Fund.

Leaving the Pack by David J. O'Brien - Urban horror romance, with new excerpt

"What's it about?"

Everyone asks this, as you'd expect, when I say I've just published a book.

"Werewolves," I reply.

"Ah, you're getting on the bandwagon!" they say. "Trying to ride Twilight's coattails. Everyone's reading books about vampires and werewolves these days."

It seems that people think I wrote the book thinking about what the next current fashion in novels would be. If only! If only I could write that fast.

In reality, I started Leaving the Pack in 1990. Back then, as far as I can remember, werewolves were the American one terrorising London, or were the wolf-like beings of Whitley Strieber's Wolfen, from nearly a decade before (we'll leave Teen Wolf aside, shall we?).

So if a species of intelligent wolves could exist, why not a race of men who were like wild beasts inside, whose hormone and pheromone production was affected by the moon? No reason. It seemed scientifically feasible to me.

I wrote a novella, and slowly expanded it into a novel over a number of years as I worked on other things, too. And as the years passed, I saw werewolf books and movies appear again. It's like clothing - you don't need to worry about your wardrobe not being in style. Just keep the outfits until they come back into vogue. You write what you want and sooner or later, someone will think it's the right time for it.

Werewolves and vampires are like denim jackets: they're never going to go out of fashion for very long. Romance is like blue jeans: there are lots of cuts, but it's essentially the same thing, and it's always in fashion. Put werewolves and romance together and you have a look that has lasted since Levi Strauss was wearing pocket watches.

But just like the Wolfen, my werewolves were different to everything I had seen and read about both before and after. They're not paranormal beings. They can't infect you; only kill you - albeit with extreme ease. But they only kill you if you upset them.

In short, they're real. So real that I had at one time considered writing "an Interview with the Werewolf," where I got this whole novel from one of their kind spilling the beans on the rest of his race.

And in real life, werewolves have more time for love and romance than they have for killing, as the extract below will show... Unless you upset them.

Links

David JM O'Brien's website

Leaving the Pack

Tirgearr Publishing

David JM O'Brien on Facebook

Blurb:

Nobody believes in werewolves.

That's just what Paul McHew and his friends are counting on.

They and their kind roam our city streets: a race of people from whom the terrible legend stems; now living among us invisibly after centuries of persecution through fear and ignorance. Superficially Caucasian but physiologically very different, with lunar rhythms so strong that during the three days of the full moon they are almost completely controlled by their hormonal instincts, you might have cursed them as just another group of brawling youths or drunken gang-bangers. Now at the point of extinction, if they are to survive their existence must remain restricted to mere stories and legend, but, paradoxically, they also must marry outside their society in order to persist.

The responsibility for negotiating this knife-edge is given to Paul, who runs the streets with his friends during the full moon, keeping them out of real trouble and its resultant difficult questions. Having succeeded for years, he finds his real test of leadership comes when he meets Susan, a potential life-mate, to whom he will have to reveal his true identity if he is ever to leave his pack.

10% of the author's royalties will be donated to WWF, the World Wildlife Fund.

Excerpt:

The rain started as Susan made her way to the coast that evening. The clouds, building up all day and brooding darkly above the mountains, swept over the city and sea on a fierce, sudden wind out of the north, bringing the night with them. A number of enormous bolts, shooting down out of the black mass to the buildings and into the boiling water, followed by thunder to make men flinch and dogs cower, were the prelude to a downpour of seemingly biblical proportions. The water gullied down the streets, bringing the traffic to an almost complete halt. The bus crawled along for another half an hour, the driver’s foot forever on the brake as the cars in front continually stopped. Susan felt herself get irritated. She was going to be very late meeting Paul. It would have been quicker to walk, but the rain outside would have drenched her instantly. The very force of the drops would have plastered her light jacket to her skin and the water rebounding off the ground and puddles would have saturated the rest of her body. In some places, where the accumulated litter and rubbish of the city had clogged the drains, there were veritable ponds to cross and even the cars had to take runs at them. She took deep breaths and told herself it was fashionable for a lady to be late.

Visiting her mother had been good. She had recognized Susan and they’d had a pleasant conversation. The lights in the elder woman’s eyes appeared distant however, as if she were talking from a different epoch, but nevertheless, just as she was going, Susan told her about Paul. Her mother had seemed pleased, but told her she was a bit young to be going out with boys, she’d plenty of time for that and should be studying hard. Susan had smiled and agreed, wondering at the same time if the relationship was really serious and deciding that it was too early to know.

The bar – a wide, low-roofed room with some tables around the edges and a view out over the water – was heaving. The rain had driven the masses from the beach and half of them seemed to have taken refuge here. They would be trapped there in their shorts and t-shirts, miniskirts and beach tops until the rain ceased or at least eased and the floods abated. When she walked into the bar, however, she saw Paul immediately. He didn’t notice her arrive, and for a few seconds she just watched him from the doorway: standing quite alone in the centre of the room where there were fewer people. It didn’t seem to bother him at all. He didn’t look out of place, like you sometimes see people and would have said to your friends: ‘Hey, look at the loner,’ if you’d been back in your teens. It was as if nobody knew he was really there: a mere observer, a step back from the rest of the bar; just standing there watching everyone with an enigmatic smile on his face, as if he’d seen all this before, was appreciating a play for the second time.

To her, however, it was impossible not to notice him. She would have been less surprised to see him in same spot telling jokes or relating a story to an enraptured audience. His aura seemed to fill the air around him, swelling his being until it was the kernel of the room, the core around which everything else revolved.

As she looked at him, she felt that this was a man who could do anything he had a mind to do, who was strong enough to make a decision and stick to it in the face of any opposition. He knew his mind and was not afraid to go with how he saw things, despite what others might think, could take seemingly impossible things and make them his own. It had been a long time since she had known a man like that, and she had often wondered if she would ever encounter another.

Paul turned suddenly towards her and caught her eye smiling broadly. It almost seemed as if he had known she was there all the time, and she was a little taken aback; her gut clenched the way it had when they had first met. She grinned back, then went over and embraced him.

“Sorry I’m so late. What a nightmare!”

“No problem. I was just doing a little people-watching.”

“So I see – you look quite the anthropologist watching a tribal dance.”

He laughed and nodded. “Not far off, not far off.”

They got some drinks and sat down in a quiet corner where a young couple had just left to brave the rain, bored and whining kids in tow. Susan noticed that Paul was carrying a small rucksack. She wondered what he had it for, but decided to wait and find out rather than ask directly. A part of her hoped it was an overnight bag, for she longed to spend the night with him again. The tiny piece or her which took offence at his presumptuousness was silenced by the rest, remembering that she had invited him into her house, and had done it just once.

“How was your mother?” asked Paul.

Susan shrugged slightly before nodding. “Good. She recognized me, and we had a good chat.”

“That sounds great. Did you tell her you met the man of your dreams?”

Susan smiled softly. She was not sure why, but she decided to lie, not really ready to reveal how much she believed that herself. “I didn’t. I’m not sure how old she thought I was, so I didn’t want to upset her.”

Paul didn’t reply, but took her hand and squeezed it softly.

She felt bad then. A panicked thought shot through her mind that he could see through her childish deception, but there was nothing in his expression to suggest that. She smiled more brightly at him, brushing his face with her hand. “I told the nurse, though, and she was delighted.”

Paul laughed and moved his hand to her knee, which he squeezed harder. “Was she now?” he asked as he kissed her on the lips.

They had some more drinks, while outside the torrent subsided. The clouds dispersed, quickly whipped south by the strong wind and the last rays of the day broke through. Once the rain ceased, the bar emptied as the tourists made for their hotels to change and spend the hours of darkness in the restaurants and clubs nearer the city centre. Susan and Paul also left, walking the promenade that separated the beach from the coast road. It was a balmy evening, the dying sun making an effort to evaporate the puddles of standing water, raising the humidity again. They strolled towards Chawni Point, jutting into the sea between them and the river, just another couple among many others doing likewise. The clouds had retreated to the horizon where they hung red across the sky as the glowing sun set, like galloping horses on the edge of a plain, circling some compelling predator. Soon after, the lamps along the sea wall came on and they kept walking as the moon rose above the clouds and poured its argent life across the ocean.

When they reached the Point, they continued walking around it and stopped at a pub that faced the sea on the eastern tip. The bar was a favorite of both strollers and bikers, which made a strange but agreeable blend. Susan came here now and then herself, and it was as full as it always was. They took their drinks outside and sat on the sea wall in the mild evening breeze, gazing at the waning silver disc reflected across the oily water. The satellite seemed to seep life directly into Paul’s eyes, so brightly did they glow in the gloom. The hot passion of before had not returned, and she wondered if it would disappear with the moon each month. However, it was replaced with something else, something more precious to her for being less tangible. She felt that her life would be like the night sky without the resplendence of that satellite, should Paul retreat his presence. She would be without meaning, without life, were he to suddenly disappear. The thought gave her a slight surge of fear, but that fear gave way to something else as she recognized it for what it was: love; the worry that someone she needed would not need her in return. Her heart soared tentatively in this private revelation, glad it had at last encountered this mysterious sensation, but amazed at its abruptness, its sudden evolution. She felt an urge to reveal it then and there, to make her declaration of love in the pearly luminescence, above the vermeil waves, but quelled it cruelly. Reluctant to show her vulnerability, despite its potential luxury, she had not gotten to this pearl-drenched headland by falling at anyone’s feet and would walk away from it as proud as she had arrived, arm in arm with the man whose very skin seeped steel. She would carry her concern untended until ready to tell him the true depth of her feelings and presumed it was an anxiety shared by all, a trepidation that never quite left. Susan wondered if the moon depended upon the night as much as the night depended on the moon, in the infinite dance of the earth and its satellite, and she felt the silver light fill her own being, not directly, but through his luminous eyes. After midnight, they continued westwards past the southern part of the harbor, in which most of the smaller private crafts were moored, and back into the city, where they caught a taxi back to her flat once more.

Leaving the Pack by David J.O'Brien - atypical werewolves and fasion trends

"What's it about?"

Everyone asks this, as you'd expect, when I say I have just had a book published.

"Werewolves," I reply.

"Ah, you're getting on the bandwagon!" they say. "Trying to ride Twilight's coattails. Everyone's reading books about vampires and werewolves these days."

It seems that people think I wrote the book thinking about what the next current fashion in novels would be. If only! If only I could write that fast.

In reality, I started Leaving the Pack in 1990. Back then, as far as I can remember, werewolves were the American one terrorising London, or were the wolf-like beings of Whitley Strieber's Wolfen, from nearly a decade before (we'll leave Teen Wolf aside, shall we?).

So if a species of intelligent wolves could exist, why not a race of men who were like wild beasts inside, whose hormone and pheromone production was affected by the moon? No reason. It seemed scientifically feasible to me.

I wrote a novella, and slowly expanded it into a novel over a number of years as I worked on other things, too. And as the years passed, I saw werewolf books and movies appear again. It's like clothing - you don't need to worry about your wardrobe not being in style. Just keep the outfits until they come back into vogue. You write what you want and sooner or later, someone will think it's the right time for it.

Werewolves and vampires are like denim jackets: they're never going to go out of fashion for very long. Romance is like blue jeans: there are lots of cuts, but it's essentially the same thing, and it's always in fashion. Put werewolves and romance together and you have a look that has lasted since Levi Strauss was wearing pocket watches.

But just like the Wolfen, my werewolves were different to everything I had seen and read about both before and after. They're not paranormal beings. They can't infect you; only kill you - albeit with extreme ease. But they only kill you if you upset them.

In short, they're real. So real that I had at one time considered writing "an Interview with the Werewolf," where I got this whole novel from one of their kind spilling the beans on the rest of his race.

And a part of me still sometimes wonders whether I might not get a knock on my door one of these nights, now that the book has come out, from some dark strangers inquiring exactly where I got my information from. If that does happen, I hope they will consider that I've shown them in a positive light. But I'll let them review the manuscripts for the next two novels, to make sure there's nothing disagreeable. I wouldn't want to upset them.

Blurb:

Nobody believes in werewolves.

That's just what Paul McHew and his friends are counting on.

They and their kind roam our city streets: a race of people from whom the terrible legend stems; now living among us invisibly after centuries of persecution through fear and ignorance. Superficially Caucasian but physiologically very different, with lunar rhythms so strong that during the three days of the full moon they are almost completely controlled by their hormonal instincts, you might have cursed them as just another group of brawling youths or drunken gang-bangers. Now at the point of extinction, if they are to survive their existence must remain restricted to mere stories and legend, but, paradoxically, they also must marry outside their society in order to persist.

The responsibility for negotiating this knife-edge is given to Paul, who runs the streets with his friends during the full moon, keeping them out of real trouble and its resultant difficult questions. Having succeeded for years, he finds his real test of leadership comes when he meets Susan, a potential life-mate, to whom he will have to reveal his true identity if he is ever to leave his pack.

10% of the author's royalties will be donated to WWF, the World Wildlife Fund.

Links

David JM O'Brien's website

Leaving the Pack

Tirgearr Publishing

David JM O'Brien on Facebook

Excerpt:

Paul turned his attention to the remaining man, lying on his belly, holding his face. He rolled him over and pulled his hand away to reveal a large gash on his left cheek, running from just under his eye down to the angle of his jaw. It was deep, with ragged edges, and was bleeding profusely.

The sluice gate inside Paul shut with the force of a falling guillotine and the adrenaline immediately began to rise once more. This time, however, it was impure. Mixed with vitriolic rage, it boiled dangerously. Paul let the man's hand go and stood up, whirling around to face the pack, his face grimaced with anger. The wound was obviously a bite, and the one rule of running with the pack was not to give in to the urge to seriously damage someone, especially in a way that would arouse interest, something a bite was sure to do. Once teeth were used, it was easy to inflict a mortal wound. That had to be avoided at all costs. There was just no room for such mistakes, and the pack knew it. This had not happened in a very long time. Paul had had to reprimand two of the others in the past and it had been an unpleasant experience for all of them. This incident now, just as he needed to think about leaving the pack in James’s hands, made him furious. He could not brook this behavior. He did not intend to leave James the job of controlling an unruly mob. He had to castigate. Lessons had to be learnt, however painful that was to be.

“Who did this?” he snarled.

They remained silent, avoiding his eyes as he glared at each one of them, his rage threatening to explode into violence.

“Who was it?” he roared, trying to expend his fury through his voice and lessen the chance of unnecessary physical action.

Sebastian took a deep breath and stepped forward, meeting Paul's eyes and holding them, ready to become the subject of his wrath.

“You stupid little fuck!” Paul shouted as he strode towards him, spitting the last word out from just in front of his face.

“Sorr—”

“Don't fucking speak. Don't try to say a word.” Paul stopped Sebastian’s apology by grabbing his throat. Sebastian stood there, his cheeks turning crimson as he struggled to breathe and then gave up, relaxing himself as much as he could. Paul knew he was trying to slow down the build-up of his own aggression, his own adrenaline, which would soon reach a level at which he would have to fight back. Paul ignored this. His own fury attained an intensity that Sebastian could never reach, would rend him if he tried to struggle. He heard the whisper approach him with its appealing message, a susurrus sweeping along the street from unseen alleys, rearing up out of the black water below him, tempting him, telling him to squeeze, to place his might in the locked knuckles and permit them do as they would. “Wield your power!” it whispered. “Subjugate!”

Paul continued speaking. “What have you been told?” He addressed the whole group. “What have I said about fights? The most important thing about these days? James? What have I told them?”

“No teeth.”

“No teeth,” Paul repeated, nodding, looking hard at Sebastian, who did not show any indication that he had heard. The epin eph rine ran through Paul’s arteries like acid, scalding his every cell as they cried out in concert, screaming for action. The voice whirled around him like a tornado, threatening to tear him from himself. Seductions and temptations reached out of the wind like hands and tried to take him into it, but he blocked them out, concentrated on the centre of his being. In that place was his reality, a knowledge which outweighed any coaxing or beguiling tones, a knot so heavy that it anchored him in spite of the gales about.

“What would have happened if you had bitten him a bit lower and cut his jugular? He would be dead, of course. And I would be in trouble if there were questions about a man being bitten to death, wouldn't I? And I don't like trouble. Especially, when it's not of my own making and the source of the trouble is not getting the same aggravation as me. And why would you not be getting hassle? Because you'd be dead, wouldn't you? And I don't like killing people. So don't make me kill you, all right?”

As he said this, he released his hold on Sebastian's throat, letting him fall to his knees and gulp lungfuls of air. He shook off the voice repugnantly and it instantly vanished from his mind, its whisper swept away along the river into the gloom. The gates opened and the anger began to subside once more. All that was left was a slight dizziness at the depth of the void and a bitter taste in his mouth. He watched Sebastian for a second, making sure he was in control and not about to attack. Then he looked up at the others.

“I think we both need a drink. Let's get out of here. The cops will arrive soon.”