REVIEW: The Wolfboy of Rego Park
By Jack Sargeant

Author: Jeffrey Wengrofsky
Publisher: Far West Press
Year of Release: 2023

Rego Park forms the backdrop to the opening tale of this quasi-autobiographical collection of short stories which unfold in the author’s native New York City. Bitten by a dog as a child, the youthful Jeffrey wonders if the series of rabies shots he has to undergo are related to the risk of lycanthropy. A process that affirms his outsider status, initially as a (potential) wolf boy, but, in later stories, through his
experiences as a punk, disgruntled office worker, and politically motivated campaigner.

This first story sets the scene of much that follows in the ensuing tales, as the narrator dodges bullies at school, is sucker punched at a hardcore show, hangs out in the punk scene, gets injured and arrested at an anti-war protest and navigates life in the city. Told with the instinct of a natural storyteller, whether describing a friend having a relationship with a woman whose pet python winds around them in bed or being headbutted by an assailant who resembles a pirate, there is an imagination at play through Wengrofsky’s prose. There is also a sense of New York as a character in these stories, from the Bowery and Lower East Side through to Brooklyn, Manhattan’s bridges, and, in the final story, the subway. Wengrofsky’s New York is a city both lived-in and living.

In places reading The Wolfboy of Rego Park, with its evocation of family, sub-cultural communities and identities, as well as its visceral appreciation for the potential violence of youth, recalls Richard Price’s The Wanderers (1974). But Wengrofsky’s work is his own creation, and these stories - reflections of an outsider living through the slow-motion insanities of life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries - are well worth your time.