The Book That Teaches Us to Live With Our Fears

In classic fables and fairy tales, no predator—and perhaps no villain—makes more frequent appearances than the wolf. Greek antiquity gives us the Boy Who Cried Wolf, Little Red Riding Hood famously gets eaten by a wolf, and yet another one blows down the Three Little Pigs’ houses. Wolfish, the writer Erica Berry’s debut, looks both at these invented wolves and at the real ones that have, of late, returned to her home state of Oregon; she also examines the more contemporary wolf metaphors—lone-wolf terrorists, warriors as wolves—that many people use to describe, or perhaps justify, their fear of other humans.

Berry has suffered badly from fear of that “symbolic wolf”—a term she gets from the veterinary anthropologist Elizabeth Lawrence. This is ’s true subject. Her wolf is a male one, created by a string of disturbing encounters with men and by a lifetime of messages—explicit and subliminal alike—that tell girls