Loup Garou (1960) and "Three Shadows of the Wolf" (1974/1975)

"I don't mean that. You said ‘Being French, you would be superstitious.’ You'd have to be out of your mind to say a thing like that. There can no more be a superstitious Frenchman than there can be dry water or green horses. Think about the implications of that for a long time. Then your little problem will have solved itself." Loup Garou

Some truisms: Lafferty wrote about conmen, he loved the tall tale, and he thought a lot about consensus reality. Paul Saka’s recent article on Lafferty raises questions about all this and touches directly on my interest in how Lafferty read 20th-century history. I recommend the piece to anyone drawn to these issues and will share my thoughts on it, both in agreement and in critique.

The article advances several subarguments, but its main conclusion is that Lafferty was guilty of doublethink and of bullshit in Harry Frankfurt’s sense. Frankfurt, the American philosopher, defined bullshit not as lying but as speech delivered with indifference to the truth. Here, I would qualify my agreement with Saka, though I unreservedly agree with his other thesis: that “Been A Long, Long Time” is a satire on evolution, not a free will theodicy.

This has me thinking about Lafferty’s unpublished novel Loup Garou because of an interesting scene in it, between the main character, Sheriff Pidgeon, and the thirteen-year-old Clela Ragley, one of Lafferty’s unnervingly precocious female teens. Clela says, "Whatever else about us rednecks, Sheriff, we can think a thing two different ways at once. Most of them believed it, but they enjoyed it." To this, Pidgeon says, "Yes, we can. With one part of our minds we see how impossible it is for a wolf to turn into a man, and with another part we can believe that it happens after all.”

I wonder whether there is a more direct example of Lafferty showing a character endorse doublethink. For Saka, this is not only an epistemic problem in Lafferty but also an aesthetic one: a problem because it reveals an indifference to truth, and a problem because that indifference is bound up with a radical epistemology. Saka calls this postmodern. I don’t. But I do think he has identified an issue that anyone thinking seriously about Lafferty needs to confront.

And I agree that violations of truth can be aesthetic blemishes. The best example I know comes from Christopher Ricks, who pointed out that Piggy’s glasses in Lord of the Flies could not have been used to light a fire: Piggy is shortsighted; his lenses would not focus the sun’s rays. There is an excellent discussion of this aspect of literature in one of my favorite books of the past twenty years, Peter Lamarque’s The Philosophy of Literature (2008). Saka sees Lafferty’s satire of evolution in “Been A Long, Long Time” as guilty of this same sort of fault: so far off from the mathematically factual that it becomes aesthetically marring. (Another blemish for Saka is Lafferty’s strawmanning of evolution as pure chance, something at odds with both Darwin and the modern synthesis.) I think, rather, that the satire is on an anti-teleological cosmos, with evolution as Lafferty’s chosen punching bag. Hence the polarity set up at the beginning. On that basis I’d make a more generous case for the story—though, to confess my own heresy, it’s not a story I particularly enjoy.

So, a little background on Loup Garou, because it is even more relevant to what Saka has brought to the Lafferty conversation than a pulled quote showing characters discussing doublethink and bullshit. Readers know the version titled “Three Shadows of the Wolf,” first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in March 1975—but that was the end of a long manuscript process. Lafferty had been working on the story since 1960. The full version is the unpublished novel Loup Garou, which he later cut down into the short story we have. What he did in the process was remarkable: he completely inverted it in the trim and rewrite.

In the original novel, the werewolf isn’t real. In the short story, there are three werewolves who murder Sheriff Pidgeon. The question, then, is how Lafferty moved from what I have called a novel in the pre-nucleated stage of the Ghost Story to a short story that lies more than halfway along its path and can be situated within the Ghost Story and its developing themes.

To transform the novel’s rational mystery into a story that asserts the reality of the supernatural, Lafferty first re-engineered the original plot into an elaborate narrative trap. He took the novel’s logical resolution (the explanation of a human murder plot motivated by greed) and repurposed it as a false climax in the short story. This deception rests on the very same reasoning that truly solves the novel, namely the triumphant rationalism of the mentor figure, Sheriff Bartholdy.

In both versions, Bartholdy gives Pidgeon the key to debunking superstition. He insists, with certainty: “There can no more be a superstitious Frenchman than there can be dry water or green horses. Think about the implications of that for a long time. Then your little problem will have solved itself.” In the novel, this is enough for Sheriff Pidgeon to see through the conspiracy. In the short story, however, Lafferty weaponizes rationalist certainty, making it the cornerstone of an epistemically justified but ultimately false conclusion. The reader is lulled. The Scooby-Doo-like unmasking takes place. The ordinary motives of greed and spousal betrayal are exposed. And then Lafferty pulls the rug out from under the reader with there being real honest to gosh werewolves.

This is a complete thematic reversal of the original, achieved by the addition of a coda that overturns the rational conclusion the reader of the novel is expected to accept. Where the novel closes with the arrest of the human conspirators and an affirmation of forensic logic, the short story says, “not so fast.” The “three shadows” appear before Pidgeon. They are real werewolves, and one of them explains that the human criminals have just died in jail—not for murder, but for their disbelief: “Ribaul is at this minute dead in your jail also, man-bit and wolf-bit. He dies for his unbelief, and for other things.” This new dialogue re-contextualizes the entire preceding narrative and would be unthinkable in the original novel, which builds steadily toward the rationalist deflation of the superstitious rednecks. In revising the book, Lafferty had to erase the smartest rationalists, characters such as the roguish Lysander Grogg.

Going one step further, the human plot, which initially seemed to be the central mystery, is revealed in the rewrite to be a side story, and the deeper crime is a failure to acknowledge a monstrous, supernatural reality.

I’ve argued that as the 1970s went on, Lafferty’s movement away from the kind of fiction he wrote in Okla Hannali and The Fall of Rome coincided with his growing interest in exploring the oceanic. One way of reading this shift is to say that he became more inward-looking, more detached from canons of truth, less concerned with adding further chapters to his proposed American novel, more inclined to indulge tendencies toward doublethink and bullshit. This is not my view, but it's something the history of the Loup Garou invites us to think about. Saka has given Lafferty readers some powerful tools for doing so.

Loup Garou	'Three Shadows of the Wolf'	Changes & Nuances	Impact
The Opening & Premise (Ch. 1)	Retained but Heavily Condensed	The core premise (sheep-killings, a strange wolf) and the scene in Scroggins's store are kept. However, the lengthy, atmospheric dialogue is trimmed to its essential plot points: the badge debate, Scroggins's warning, and the introduction of the main characters.	Pace over Atmosphere: The adaptation sacrifices the novel's slow-burn world-building for a faster pace. It immediately introduces the "three shadowy followers," a hook not present in the novel's opening, prioritizing genre expectations over immersion.
The First Hunt & First Supernatural Proof (Ch. 2-3)	Ch. 2 is Excised. Ch. 3 is Altered & Re-sequenced.	The entire first hunt (Ch. 2), including the key mystery of the wolf's scent changing to a man's, is cut. The "Transforming Tracks" discovery (Ch. 3) is retained, but it is re-sequenced to happen later and is treated as a piece of forensic evidence Pidgeon photographs, not his first, sanity-shattering encounter with the impossible.	Withholding Direct Proof: This is a crucial structural change. The novel confronts Pidgeon with undeniable supernatural proof early on, making the story about his psychological struggle. The story withholds this proof, reframing the narrative as a more conventional detective mystery where the evidence is initially ambiguous.
The Initial Investigation (Ch. 4, 6)	Retained	The initial interrogation of the Lamottes at their farmhouse (Ch. 4) is fully retained. The "Tail Hunt" scene (Ch. 6) that publicly singles out Lamotte is also kept. The story adds the detail of Lamotte being accompanied by "three big men" during this scene, a detail not in the novel.	Establishing the False Suspect & Foreshadowing: These scenes serve to establish Jules Lamotte as the prime suspect in both versions. The story's addition of the "three men" is critical foreshadowing for its twist ending, tying the seemingly rational suspect to the story's supernatural element from the very beginning.
The Intellectual & Folkloric Core (Ch. 5, 7, 15)	Excised	The novel's entire intellectual framework is removed. This includes the character of Lysander Grogg and his academic lectures on lycanthropy (Ch. 7, 15), as well as Corbey's detailed "folk-biological" guide to werewolf transformation (from Ch. 5).	Shift from Philosophical Mystery to Primal Horror: By removing all attempts to rationalize, historicize, or systematize the supernatural, the adaptation transforms the werewolf from a topic of intellectual debate into a raw, unknowable, and terrifying force. This is a fundamental genre shift.
Escalating Proof & The Final Hunt (Ch. 8-13)	Retained but Condensed	The core sequence of events is kept: Clela as wolf bait, the wolf-man confrontation, Madelon's and Clela's dramatic "proof," the final hunt, the shooting of the wolf, the staking of the wolf's corpse, the discovery of Lamotte's body, and Pidgeon's illegal autopsy. Lengthy internal monologues and secondary conversations are trimmed.	Accelerating the Plot: The condensation creates a relentless, high-stakes sequence of events. Retaining the staking and the illegal autopsy is crucial as it preserves Pidgeon's psychological breakdown and complicity in the ritual, making the subsequent logical explanation feel like a desperately needed return to sanity.
The Central Paradox (Ch. 14)	Altered (Retained as a setup, then dismissed)	The mystery of the vanished wolf carcass is introduced. Pidgeon and the men return to the kill site and find the body gone. However, where the novel makes this the central puzzle of its second half, the story has another character immediately dismiss it as the narrative pivots to a rational explanation, effectively dropping the paradox.	The "Bait-and-Switch": This is a masterful piece of misdirection. The story raises an impossible question only to immediately offer a logical "escape route" (the hoax theory), lulling the reader into a false sense of security and making them complicit in dismissing the supernatural.
The Rational Resolution (Ch. 16-17)	Retained	The sequence featuring the mentor character, Sheriff Bartholdy, is fully retained. This includes the fishing trip and the Socratic dialogue where Bartholdy provides Pidgeon with the logical key to deconstruct the supernatural events and identify a human conspiracy.	Constructing the False Climax: By keeping the novel's entire logical resolution and its authoritative source (Bartholdy), the story makes the "hoax" explanation feel earned, definitive, and final. This solidifies the narrative trap for the reader, ensuring the final twist is as shocking as possible.
The Conclusion (Ch. 18 vs. New Material)	Altered & Replaced	The story uses the novel's conclusion (Pidgeon's monologue explaining the human murder plot) as its penultimate scene. It then adds a coda: the "three shadows" reveal themselves to be real werewolves, explain that the supernatural story was true all along, and brutally kill Pidgeon.	Thematic Reversal: This is the story's masterstroke. The entire preceding narrative is re-contextualized as an elaborate deception. The novel concludes that rationality triumphs over superstition. The story concludes that rationality is fragile and that a monstrous, supernatural reality was the truth all along.