Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf

Before Bram Stoker gave us Dracula, George W. M. Reynolds gave us Wagner: a shepherd so desperate to escape poverty and loneliness that he bargains with the devil himself. The contract is simple: youth, wealth, and a beautiful estate in Renaissance Italy. The price is monstrous. Once each month, at the hunter's moon, Wagner transforms into a wehr-wolf, a creature of savage hunger with no memory of his human life. What begins as a Faustian bargain becomes a meditation on the beast within, as Wagner's transformations grow more frequent and more deadly. Set against the turbulent backdrop of 16th-century Italy, with its warring princes and decadent courts, this is Gothic horror at its most visceral and unapologetic. Murder, kidnap, robbery, and sadistic nuns populate a narrative that made Reynolds the most famous penny dreadful writer of Victorian England. It endures because it understands something primal: the terror of losing oneself, the terrible seduction of the Faustian bargain, and the darkness that lurks beneath the surface of respectability.