Five Werewolf Novels That Aren’t The Werewolf of Paris

The werewolf has had worse luck than the vampire. Dracula gave the vampire a canonical text early, and everything since has been in conversation with it. The werewolf got its rules from a screenplay – Curt Siodmak’s for The Wolf Man in 1941 – which means the fiction written before that date was working without a rulebook, and is much stranger for it. Silver is not always silver. The moon is frequently irrelevant. The transformation is sometimes a disease, sometimes an inheritance, and sometimes something a whole village has agreed on together.

These five are the ones we would hand to a reader who has finished Endore and wants to know what else is out there. Four can be read free and legally today. All five are harder to come by than they should be.

The Were-Wolf Clemence Housman · 1896

Housman told this story out loud before she wrote it down. It began in 1884 as something she said to the students in her wood-engraving class, reached print in the 1890 Christmas number of Atalanta, a magazine for girls, and became a book in 1896 under John Lane’s Bodley Head imprint – Clemence cutting the woodblocks herself, her brother Laurence designing everything around them.

A stranger comes in out of the snow to a Northern farmstead where a household is at supper. She is beautiful, she gives her name as White Fell, and one of the two brothers in the house understands what she is long before anyone will listen to him.

A reviewer in 1896 called it “half fairy tale, half allegory,” which remains the most accurate sentence anyone has written about it. The prose moves the way her engravings do: hard edges, black masses, very little grey. Critics since have read White Fell as a figure for a woman required to occupy two irreconcilable roles at once, which is not much of a stretch from a writer who would later go to prison for the suffrage campaign.

Try it if: You want prose with a grain to it, and you can take a story that is working on you allegorically while it is frightening you literally.
Read it: Free, complete: Project Gutenberg 13131. For the textual history and the 1896 reviews, the COVE scholarly edition.

The Undying Monster Jessie Douglas Kerruish · 1922

Subtitled A Tale of the Fifth Dimension, which tells you how seriously it means to take its own machinery. The Hammand family of Old Dannow Manor in Sussex have a curse that has lain quiet for years and has just stopped lying quiet. The person they call in is Luna Bartendale, an occult detective and among the earliest women to hold that job anywhere in the form.

What makes it worth the trouble is that Bartendale genuinely investigates. She reads, she cross-references, she opens a barrow. The book is built like a detective novel that happens to admit the supernatural rather than a horror novel with a detective bolted to the front.

It was filmed in 1942 by John Brahm for Twentieth Century Fox, on the back of Universal’s success with The Wolf Man, and the film does the thing the book refuses to do: it kills the monster. Kerruish cures hers. That difference is the whole argument of the novel in one decision.

Try it if: You like Golden Age detection and enjoy a writer who wants the uncanny explained rather than merely survived.
Read it: In print from the British Library in its Tales of the Weird series, number 46, with an introduction by Mike Ashley. ISBN 978-0-7123-5493-6. Any bookshop can order it. Some sources date the novel to 1936; that is a reprint, and the first edition is 1922.

The Thing in the Woods Harper Williams · 1913, revised 1924

Margery Williams published this in Britain in 1913 under her own name, nine years before The Velveteen Rabbit made that name mean something else entirely. In 1924 she revised it and let it out again in America as Harper Williams – a pseudonym assembled from her mother’s surname and her father’s. The American text runs to twenty-two chapters against the British twenty-one, with the ending enlarged and spread across four.

Austin Haverill, a young hospital doctor, takes a summer practice in Pennsylvania Dutch country expecting quiet work. He finds a district that runs on partial knowledge. Neighbours watch each other, stories circulate and change in the retelling, a household is boycotted and nobody will say why. Haverill has been trained to explain things and the novel is patient about letting him try.

Its real subject is not the thing in the woods. It is the speed at which a community assembles an explanation out of rumour, and the point at which a confident professional discovers that his categories will not hold what he is looking at. The book also reached H. P. Lovecraft’s circle in the month of its American publication – Frank Belknap Long bought a copy, and Lovecraft wrote a verse inscription in it – which is a real footnote and not evidence of anything more.

Try it if: The interesting part of a monster story, for you, is the village rather than the monster, and a book of 1913 that talks like one will not stop you.
Read it: Free, complete: Project Gutenberg 76059. The restored and annotated edition, with forty-five contextual notes on the region, medicine, and folklore, is published by Squire Press. ISBN 978-1-0674594-7-5.

The Man-Wolf Erckmann-Chatrian · 1859 or 1860; translated 1876

Hugues-le-Loup in the French. A physician named Fritz is summoned to the Count of Nideck, who suffers episodes that look like a terrible kind of madness and arrive on a schedule nobody can account for. Fritz does what doctors in these books do: he observes, he takes a history, he looks for a cause. What he finds runs back through the family to an ancestor who murdered his first wife, and outward to an old woman in the district whom everyone calls the Black Plague.

Read it next to The Thing in the Woods and the pairing does something neither book does alone. Two doctors, sixty years and an ocean apart, both certain that a careful enough examination will resolve the thing in front of them, and both wrong in the same direction.

Try it if: You like your Gothic Continental, hereditary and slightly clinical.
Read it: Free, complete, in the 1876 English translation: Project Gutenberg 15745, where it leads a collection of four tales.

The Wolf in the Garden Alfred H. Bill · 1931

An upstate New York village not long after the Revolution acquires a new resident: a French émigré aristocrat, the Comte de Saint Loup, who arrives with a very large wolfhound and a name that is a joke nobody in the book gets. Killings follow.

Bill was a working historical novelist, and the period detail is the reason to read it – the werewolf story is competent, but the early American setting is doing something almost nobody else in the genre was attempting. It is also worth noting the date. In 1931 the rules everyone now thinks of as ancient werewolf lore had not been written; Curt Siodmak invented most of them for The Wolf Man ten years later. Bill was working without them.

Try it if: You want to see what the werewolf looked like before the film industry standardized it.
Read it: Borrowable free from the Internet Archive. In print from Wildside Press, ISBN 978-1-4344-7923-5; the 1931 first edition also circulates secondhand.

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