The Wolf Gift

When Reuben, otherwise known as Sunshine Boy, was sent to write a piece about the uncertain future of the giant house on the cliff, he wasn't expecting to warm so instantly to elegant heiress Marchent Nideck. Nor was he expecting to get caught up in a violent attack which will leave him changed in ways he could never have imagined...

Anne Rice's "Vampire Chronicles" defined a genre, but now she has another age-old story in her sights: the terrifying werewolf legend. The classic monster of horror fiction is here reimagined and reinvented, with all Rice's supernatural sympathy and inventiveness, as a romantic being, a potentially tragic figure bestowed with the gift of transformation and transcendence.

"The Wolf Gift" is a glorious celebration - of storytelling, of possibility, of truths revealed in the half-light. And in "The Wolf Gift"'s Reuben, we have a brand new hero for a brand new Anne Rice world.

Writing this book was a pure joy.  It was a return for me to gothic motifs --- the old dark house,  a mysterious death, the promise of family secrets, and the supernatural monster as hero -- that I had used in the Vampire Chronicles, and the Tales of the Mayfair Witches.  And once again,  I felt compelled to create an origin story and a cosmology --- this time for my protagonist, Reuben Golding, who finds himself periodically turning into the werewolf of legend.  Only unlike the doomed werewolves of so many popular films, Reuben retains full awareness during the transformation and a keen enjoyment of his immense wolfen powers.  He never becomes a four footed animal, but remains a deeply conflicted, fierce but compassionate beast-man,  hungry for power, and for answers as to the mystery of what he has become.  Though similar in many ways to my vampires novels,  Reuben's story is almost entirely contemporary.  And for the first time in my writing career I explored the haunted atmosphere of California's cold, mist shrouded redwood forests, and the romance of the windswept northern California coast.  I lived in northern California for over thirty years, and it was a great pleasure to get back to it, to have my hero dining in San Francisco's North Beach, or meeting his lady love in the quaint town of Mill Valley for breakfast, or driving his sports car north on Highway 101 as he pushes deeper into a grim but at times glorious adventure.  ------ I've been asked: will this be a series? I don't know.  I held nothing back in the writing of The Wolf Gift, but the characters are alive in my imagination, as vividly as any I've ever created, and I see the grand house of Nideck Point looming against a leaden sky, beckoning me just as it beckoned my hero, Reuben.