Franklin Gregory - The White Wolf

Franklin Gregory - The White Wolf (Random House, 1941)




Cover reproduced from unz.org, where you'll find the entire issue.

Sara de Camp-d'Avesnes encounters a mysterious stranger at the Macallister's Halloween ball and finds herself compelled to visit him at his house on 9th Street in Philadelphia's own Harlem, first with friends, but then, on several occasions, alone. Unknown to her, the "Doctor" is her ancestor, Hugues, who burned down an Abbey in 1131, killing all within. After death he haunted the site of his crime in the guise of "a huge white wolf burdened with chains."

Sara's boyfriend, David Trent, becomes so concerned at her listlessness and increasingly eccentric behaviour that he consults a psychiatrist, Hardt, but is initially unable to interest him in the case. When a baby is kidnapped and its head is found near the Doctor's house on 9th, David's father, Manning, puts up a $5000 reward for the apprehension of the murderer, and the State Troopers are called in. Several farmyard animals are attacked before the body of a second child is discovered half-eaten and Nellie Sage, the village idiot, swears to have seen a huge white wolf carrying off the luckless infant. Luckily, her being the village idiot, nobody believes her.

David is concerned at Sara's nocturnal wanderings while the monster is at large, and her father, Pierre, is frantic. Consulting the family annals, he hits on the appalling truth - the taint of lycanthrope has recurred with each seventh generation since Hugues sold his soul to the Devil!

Having convinced the sceptical Dr. Hardt and Manning Trent that his daughter is indeed a werewolf, Pierre must now find a way of curing his daughter and putting a stop to her murders. By now though, she has an accomplice and between them they're responsible for murdering soldiers, grave-robbing and "snuffling about the rear of the mortuary."

Meanwhile a reporter from The Herald Tribune has picked up on the local gossip and lies in wait for her with camera poised. And someone steals a silver chalice from the Catholic Church and melts it down for bullets ...

The White Wolf is among the better traditional werewolf novels, not least for Gregory's refusal to allow everyone to live happily ever after, and this could really do with a modern reprinting (I think the last one was back in the August 1952 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries magazine.)