A Deliciously Sinister Read for Halloween


It was All Souls’ eve, and the wind howled along the bleak hill side, whistling drearily through the naked branches of the forest trees, whose last leaves it had long since stripped; the sun had disappeared; a dense and chilling fog spread through the air like the mourning veil of the widowed, whose day of love hath early fled.


From “Hugues, the Wer-Wolf,” Terrifying Transformations.


Few things can be as satisfying on a cold autumn night as a good horror story, and werewolves provide them in abundance. I’m not talking Twilight here, or even Lon Chaney. I mean old-fashioned gothic tales of wolf-men and wolf-women. The werewolf is as ancient as Gilgamesh: a deeply-rooted symbol of the terrors that threaten society and the dark forces that lurk in our minds. A reminder of our animal selves.

Terrifying Transformations: An Anthology of Victorian Werewolf Fiction offers fifteen entertaining stories from an era when English readers’ appetite for the gothic was at its keenest. From works by well-known writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Bram Stoker to stories that have never before been anthologized, this book brings together an alluring mixture of eery and intriguing tales of lycanthropy.


According to editors Alexis Easley and Shannon Scott, werewolf stories were especially popular in the Victorian era because they embodied cultural anxieties. The Industrial Revolution had brought a tsunami of social change. Urbanization, population growth, labor unrest, women’s liberation and shocking new ideas about the  evolution of species were rocking British society to its core. Tales of werewolves were entertaining diversions—but they were also expressions of apprenhension and disorientation.


In Terrifying Transformations, you will find a delicious smogasbord of perfectly sinister tales, shrouded in the lavish prose of gothic fiction. Three children huddle in a lone cabin in the Hartz Mountains, waiting for their father to return from the hunt. They have no idea what lies in store for them.  A young English student, out walking by himself, takes shelter in a cave full of the bones of small animals. He hears footsteps. The monks of a medieval monastery huddle together on a freezing winter night. There is a knock at the door. What wonderful, creepy fun.


If you have a scholarly bent, don’t miss the editors’ enlightening introduction, which sheds light on the Victorian age, the rise of gothic literature, and the werewolf as a common motif in folklore—and check out the abundance of supplementary materials at the end.


But if you’re just looking for the perfect way to spend Halloween, spike yourself some cider, get a fire going, and curl up with this delightfully eerie collection.