“Wolf in Wanderley” by Dave J. Andrae

Wolf in Wanderley

Dave J. Andrae
Kaji-Pup Press (2026)
ISBN: 979-8905041587
Reviewed by Paul Knobloch for Reader Views (08/2026)

Dave J. Andrae’s Wolf in Wanderley is a darkly comic crime novel about two aging men trying to salvage meaningful identities from lives that have not worked out as planned. One turns to art; the other turns to violence, fraud, and revenge. Their paths begin more than a thousand miles apart but gradually converge in a finale that is tense, strange, and satisfyingly inevitable.

Wolfgang Barnes is a forty-five-year-old independent filmmaker who relocates to southwest Florida after the death of his mother. Having inherited his parents’ bungalow and enough money to live comfortably, Wolf plans to restore his neglected films and manufacture a definitive Blu-ray collection. Several of these films and videos were previously screened at festivals and cinema clubs and discussed enthusiastically in periodicals, but that recognition has long since faded, and the cultural world has largely passed him by. For Wolf, compiling his restored work on Blu-ray is therefore more than a vanity project; it is an attempt to preserve proof that his years of struggle produced something worthwhile.

In Chicago, Leonard “Lenny” Medway has just been released from prison. Lenny once acted in one of Wolf’s films, but his erratic behavior and appetite for drugs culminated in a reckless rooftop stunt during another production. A cinematographer fell to his death, and Wolf later testified at Lenny’s trial. Lenny accepts little responsibility for the disaster. He considers himself a victim whose potential career was destroyed by jealous filmmakers, vindictive prosecutors, and a society unwilling to recognize his greatness.

Paroled to a Chicago halfway house, Lenny takes a menial job at an upscale Italian restaurant, where a young waiter recruits him for an audacious robbery that becomes the novel’s comic-noir centerpiece. Meanwhile, Wolf settles into his new Florida neighborhood and becomes involved with Maisy Albrecht, a twenty-nine-year-old punk and grocery-store bakery clerk whose grounded directness counterbalances his tendency to intellectualize nearly everything. As Wolf finds companionship and a renewed sense of purpose, Lenny embraces criminality and moves steadily closer to settling his old score. A chance encounter at the restaurant alerts Lenny to Wolf’s new life in Florida, and he decides to look up his former associate, drawing the novel’s initially separate narratives together.

Andrae’s great subject is cultural obsolescence. Wolf and Lenny are distorted reflections of one another: two middle-aged men associated with the same marginal film world, each frightened that his life will disappear without leaving a mark. Wolf responds by preserving his work. Lenny manufactures a new identity from stolen money, business cards, new clothes, and aggressive self-belief. Wolf has genuine artistic discipline but limited recognition; Lenny wants recognition without ever having developed the discipline required to earn it.

The novel is also sharply attentive to class. Graziella’s functions as a miniature social order in which exhausted employees serve comfortable patrons while Danilo lectures everyone about hard work and privately indulges himself. Reuben’s critique of exploitation contains more than a little truth, even if his answer is predation rather than solidarity. Lenny briefly discovers that money can purchase the appearance of belonging, but it cannot supply judgment, character, or an authentic history.

Wolf in Wanderley is deliberately digressive. Its characters reflect at length on aging, cinema, social media, artificial intelligence, political collapse, work, masculinity, and the erosion of shared culture. Some readers may find these passages excessive, and Andrae occasionally explains a point long after it has become clear. Yet the accumulation also creates the novel’s distinctive consciousness: funny, irritated, culturally saturated, and unable to stop examining a civilization that appears to be fraying at every edge.

When Lenny finally reaches Florida, the novel’s meditations on failure, recognition, and self-invention acquire real physical stakes. His campaign against Wolf brings two radically different responses to obscurity into violent collision: one man has accepted his modest place in the world and continued working to preserve what he created, while the other has converted disappointment into grievance and grievance into violence. Darkly funny, digressive, and consistently unpredictable, Wolf in Wanderley is an intelligent crime novel about artistic ambition, masculine vanity, and the damage done by people who would rather rewrite the past than accept responsibility for it.