The Wolf Gift

The time is the present.

The place, the rugged coast of northern California. A bluff high above the Pacific. A grand mansion full of beauty and tantalising history set against a towering redwood forest.

A young reporter on assignment from the San Francisco Observer. . . an older woman, welcoming him into her magnificent, historic family home that he has been sent to write about and that she must sell with some urgency . . . A chance encounter between two unlikely people . . . an idyllic night-shattered by horrific unimaginable violence. . .The young man inexplicably attacked-bitten-by a beast he cannot see in the rural darkness . . . A violent episode that sets in motion a terrifying yet seductive transformation as the young man, caught between ecstasy and horror, between embracing who he is evolving into and fearing who - what - he will become, soon experiences the thrill of the wolf gift. As he resists the paradoxical pleasure and enthrallment of his wolfen savagery and delights in the power and (surprising) capacity for good, he is caught up in a strange and dangerous rescue and is desperately hunted as "the Man Wolf," by authorities, the media and scientists (evidence of DNA threaten to reveal his dual existence). . .

As a new and profound love enfolds him, questions emerge that propel him deeper into his mysterious new world: questions of why and how he has been given this gift; of its true nature and the curious but satisfying pull towards goodness; of the profound realisation that there are others like him who may be watching-guardian creatures who have existed throughout time and may possess ancient secrets and alchemical knowledge and throughout it all, the search for salvation for a soul tormented by a new realm of temptations, and the fraught, exhilarating journey, still to come, of being and becoming, fully, both wolf and man.

Anne Rice's legendary 'Vampire Chronicles' immersed us in the mythology, lives and loves of a motley crew of undead; they defined a genre. And now she has another age-old story in her sights, the terrifying werewolf legend ...

The werewolf is the classic monster of horror fiction -- dark, gothic, with supernatural depth and power - but here it is reimagined and reinvented with all Anne Rice's supernatural sympathy and inventiveness, as a romantic being, a potentially tragic figure bestowed with the gift of transformation and transcendence.

Only Anne Rice could make us wonder if it's possible love a man-beast but, in The Wolf Gift's hero Reuben, we have a brand new hero for a brand new audience. The vampire is dead ... 2012 is the year of the werewolf.