Rabid

Mike Bowditch #10
Rabid (2018)

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Rabid is a Mike Bowditch short story rather than a full-length series novel, and like several of Paul Doiron’s shorter works, it uses Mike as the listener to a darker story rooted in mentor Charley Stevens’s past. The official setup is that Mike is drawn into a gruesome old case connected to Charley, with the mystery revolving around a woman living in isolation in the Maine woods and a violent incident once blamed on a rabid bat.

What gives the premise its pull is that the story is not really about a large present-day investigation so much as the slow uncovering of an old wound. The wilderness setting, the widow’s isolation, and the uneasy possibility that the original explanation never told the whole truth all give the novella a more intimate and unsettling feel than the broader Mike Bowditch novels. The rabies angle adds a raw, almost folkloric edge, while the connection to Charley makes the suspense feel personal rather than procedural.

As a series interlude, Rabid works best as a character-enriching side story that deepens the world around Mike and Charley. It is a compact piece of suspense built less around scale than around memory, violence, and the lingering shadows of the Maine backcountry. Paul Doiron has also identified it as one of the Mike Bowditch short stories later collected in Skin and Bones and Other Mike Bowditch Short Stories.