Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf

Fernand Wagner is old, poor, and alone in the Black Forest, his family taken by plague and his granddaughter Agnes vanished, when a stranger named Faust makes him an offer. Youth, wealth, and learning, in exchange for eighteen months of service and one permanent condition: at sunset on the last day of every month, Wagner must take the shape of a wolf until dawn, and kill. He accepts. Reynolds runs the consequences from 1516 to 1521, carrying his cursed hero to Florence and out across the Mediterranean, tangling him with Nisida of Riverola, a noblewoman whose deaf-muteness is an act she has sustained for ten years. Murder, shipwreck, and a family secret follow. Written at a penny a week for Reynolds’s Miscellany, it stands among the earliest full-length werewolf novels in English.