This post is brought to you by Strange Adventures by G. W. Thomas. Enjoy a fast-paced adventure filled with action and horror? Then this is the book for you with four Weird Westerns featuring Deputy Sheriff Brett Hope. “Heller” has Hope running from an ancient terror but falling amongst bad men. “Laacoon” has Hope doing the pursuing of some dark secret that is slowly killing an entire family. “Silence” features a town full of vampires, where the undead make no noise. And “Weep the Dust” sees the deputy find a job as sheriff, at last, only to have Bargainville invaded by strange zombie-like dead men. The rest of the book will take you to far places like the Alps, Labrador and the interior desert and rain forests of British Columbia. Check out the companion volume Strange Detectives too.
Here is something a little different for me, a list of werewolves without ANY Pulp stories. After a summer of BFFs (Big Fat Fantasy novels) I am ready for the autumnal change. As Summer ends and the trees start to change color, I enjoy a pile of Horror titles until at least Christmas. (After Christmas, it will be the inevitable Victorian Mystery fiction. I guess I associate Sherlock Holmes with a collection I received for Christmas many decades ago. That’s a different post.) Most people wait until the end of October for their creepy-crawlies but then they don’t live as close to the North Pole as I do. By October, there could be snow on the ground. No long glorious Falls in Alberta I am afraid. The weather is already getting colder at night, with the hours of daylight shrinking. Thoughts of ghosts and creeping terrors are much easier than they were even a few weeks ago.
Of all the monsters, the werewolf has a place of honor in my heart. I’m not sure why this is. 1970s TV movies like Moon of the Wolf (1972) or Victor Newman (Eric Braeden) playing one on Kolchak the Night Stalker (November 1, 1974) may explain it. I was young enough then to find those shows creepy. Of course, we had the comic books, too. Werewolf By Night, House of Mystery, Doctor Spektor, the Warren magazines and others. The 1970s was a great time for werewolfery. It was only years later I discovered the old Pulp stories that inspired much of what I saw in media.
But the Pulps were also late comers as this list illustrates. Werewolves go back into legend and myth with Petronius writing about them in the First Century CE. Pretty much two thousand years ago, and even with old Pete you don’t get the feeling the idea is all that new. These selections are much later, beginning with the Victorians, who sculpted much of what we think about modern lycanthopes. We slide through the Edwardians into the Modern, only stopping because of the Public Domain rules. Classics like The Werewolf of Paris (1933) by Guy Endore are still under copyright.
Still, there are treasures aplenty here from some false werewolves to Penny Dreadfuls to a modern classic written by Ian Fleming of James Bond fame’s older brother that has appeared in many anthologies from 1931 (but not from a Pulp!).
Bring on the Werewolves
1828 The Wehr-wolf of Lim0usin (The Olio, or Museum of Entertainment, February 1828) – Anonymous
1838 Hugues, the Werewolf – Sutherland Menzies
1846 Wagner, the Wehrwolf – George W. M. Reynolds
1857 The Wolf Leader – Alexandre Dumas
1859 The Man-Wolf (aka Hugues-le-Loup) by Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
1864 “The Grey Wolf” (The Portent and Other Stories, 1864) – George Macdonald
1867 The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak – Charles De Coster
1875 The Weirwolf, a Tragedy – William Forster
1890 “The Werewolf” (Atalanta, December 1890) – Clemence Housman
1895 Vandover and the Brute – Frank Norris
1896 “The Werewolf” (Second Book of Tales) – Eugene Field
1899 The Black Douglas – Samuel Rutherford Crockett
1899 Loup-Garou – Eden Phillpotts
1901 “The Lame Priest” (The Atlantic Monthly, December 1901) – S. Carleton
1915 “The Thing in the Forest” (The Fabulists, 1915) – Bernard Capes
1919 The Door of the Unreal – Gerald Biss
1922 The Undying Monster – Jessie Douglas Kerruish
1924 The Thing in the Woods – Harper Williams (Margery Williams)
1925 “The Werewolf” (Munsey’s Magazine, December 1925) – Theodore Goodrich Roberts
1931 “The Kill” (Creeps By Night) – Peter Fleming
Conclusion
You may not be ready to put away the summer books just yet. You might not see a yellow leaf for months. I will be diving into the Gothic side of fantastic literature perhaps with some of these books that I have yet to read. The Wolf Leader by Dumas is such a book. (I recall Farnsworth Wright serialized it in Weird Tales so it might feel a bit like a cheat.) Like many Horror tales, the fairy tale legacy is evident in stories like Dumas’s novel (as well as Eugene Field’s “The Werewolf”, which appeared in a book of folktales.) I enjoy this synthesis since it feels a little like those BFFs but is a Horror tale too. All the children of the Gothic tree intrigue me.
Mythos Horror & Ghostbreakers at RAGE m a c h i n e
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