[In the following review of Werewolves in Their Youth, Seaman commends the volume for its remarkable prose, inventive stories, and richly textured narratives.]

In his fourth book [Werewolves in Their Youth], Chabon again displays his nimble irony, sense of narrative adventure, flair for constructing astonishingly thorny predicaments, and remarkable facility with language. If there is a shared theme among the nine glimmering stories collected here, it is the puzzlements of fatherhood. In “Green's Book,” a divorced father of a toddler, the charming Jocelyn, feels rueful about his career as a family therapist. In the delectably complex “The Harris Fetko Story.” a grown son is reconciled with his estranged father at the bris of his baby stepbrother. And finally, in the wrenching “Son of the Wolfman,” a husband struggles mightily to summon the strength to be a father to the child sired by the man who raped his wife. Brief synopses can't begin to convey the rich texture of Chabon's involved tales, or his masterful renderings of the shifting emotional strata of troubled relationships, a sensitivity he gleefully abandons in “In the Black Mill,” a marvelously gothic tale, à la Shirley Jackson.