Title: Headline News
Characters: Chris Jennings
Timelines: 1960s
Summary: The papers could never quite capture the whole story surrounding a werewolf attack.
They had it all wrong. They always did.
Chris always read the newspaper reports that detailed the previous night's attack. It never failed to surprise him when they described the condition of the victims. Every rip and tear was lovingly mentioned. The amount of blood was sometimes exaggerated and it was always redder and stickier that actual blood really was. Missing and eviscerated body parts were a clear favorite to describe, particularly if the severed limb was found some ways away from the corpse. But nothing held quite so dear as descriptions of the victims' faces—or whatever was left of them. They were details that really drove the lost humanity of the situation home. They let the reader at home almost feel as if they were at the scene of the crime.
It lets them know what kind of violence lives in their fair city. They made these events stories for the readers to cringe and fret about but then "tut tut" their disapproval and wonder aloud about how far society had fallen since the days of their youth.
Chris couldn't blame the papers for their theatrics. Even he had to admit that they were fascinating stories.
Then they would lose him by describing the violence committed as something that only an animal would be capable of committing or enjoying. He understood why they always ran with this phrasing. Any action that a human was incapable of comprehending was inevitably blamed on an animal.
But they missed the aspect of man in these events. There were obvious things such as that there were no signs of the body being toyed with or that no animal large enough to commit such brutality were native to these areas. They also missed how their own reactions fit into the picture. After all, no animal but man would take such twisted pleasure in the scene. No other animal would constantly retell these stories with such awe that they set their perpetrator on such a high pedestal.
He knew that the attacker wasn't so much an animal that walked like a man but man pushed to the extremes of his nature. But that was knowledge he kept to himself. It was a story no one wanted to read.
