The Nature of Ghouls

Ghouls are ugly, big, brutish, and complete and utter dicks.
They also eat people.
And animals.
And ghouls.
Which means they eat dicks, which I suppose is some small comfort.

The city I live in has a serious ghoul problem. The underground is infested with them. Not everywhere, of course. Ghouls don't tend to actually like human civilization. At least, not anymore.

Okay, I'm not going to claim any kind of expertise here, but I'm a journalist and I have talked to ghouls. Yeah, they talk. Usually local languages, too. Like most of the intelligent beasties that roam our world they can appear to be human pretty easily. They aren't that inhuman to begin with. Bigger, sure, and kind of simian, and with rather nasty teeth (all the better to eat you with), but still alarmingly human.

Ghouls have a lot more going on than most people think. Clan structures with long, complicated, and pretty much entirely incorrect history. A long and storied religious history that ties them to the cradle of civilization (they speak Summerian among themselves, if that's a hint).

And, again, they're dicks. Big nasty dicks that take on power plays as a regular occurence.

Also, they stink.

And, into the depths of their malodorous tunnels Burns and I stumbled.
The tunnels under our city are rather more extensive than most people suspect. Natural caves are one thing, but ghouls are remarkable diggers, and the network between those caves they created is like a nine billion scale model of an ant hill.
We crawled through it (stooping low, at the least. Ghouls are big, but tend to go to all fours in their home turf) because the thrift store was wrecked while we were off dealing with Morris, and there was a clear enough trail to the sewers. Ghouls can be sneaky and subtle when they need to be, consummate predators that they are, but they clearly sent in a team of dumb muscle for this one. Didn't think the mortals were worth much bother.
After calling an ambulance to assist, and Hank and our friend Susana LaFay in for help, we followed the trail into the tunnels.

Not going to go into full details of what down in that rank, festering bunghole, but it wasn't pretty. It was violent. Guns were fired, heads were smashed, fangs were soaked in blood, and Burns blew a bunch of shit up.
Whole thing was a mess.

At the end, though, all four of us were alive, and unharmed.
And the ghouls who made the theft were very, very dead. Nice thing about ghouls, they don't come back once they're put down.

It kind of sucks to kill living, thinking beings, even if they are dicks, but... they hurt humans, and you know how I feel about humans.

It's a strange thing about ghouls, too. They're bigger than humans. Meaner. Better hunters. Craftier. Cunning-er. All around better, from any survivalist perspective. I've even seen them regrow limbs over a few months.

But, nevertheless, humans left Sumer and built new empires, and the ghouls just wallow in their holes.

Evolution may be a darn bit more complicated than we think.