SOURCE: "Olalla" (1887) by Robert Louis Stevenson

DESCRIPTION: "Her great eyes opened wide, the pupils shrank into points; a veil seemed to fall from her face, and leave it sharply expressive and yet inscrutable.  And as I still stood, marvelling a little at her disturbance, she came swiftly up to me, and stooped and caught me by the hand; and the next moment my hand was at her mouth, and she had bitten me to the bone.  The pang of the bite, the sudden spurting of blood, and the monstrous horror of the act, flashed through me all in one, and I beat her back; and she sprang at me again and again, with bestial cries, cries that I recognised, such cries as had awakened me on the night of the high wind.  Her strength was like that of madness; mine was rapidly ebbing with the loss of blood; my mind besides was whirling with the abhorrent strangeness of the onslaught, and I was already forced against the wall, when Olalla ran betwixt us, and Felipe, following at a bound, pinned down his mother on the floor. "

PLOT: A wounded English officer goes to Spain to recover. He rents a resedencia from an empoverished but noble family. He meets the idiot brother, Felipe, the babling mother and finally the beautiful sister, Olalla, who he falls deeply in love with. Olalla feels for him but can never leave her home because of the family curse (lycanthropy). The officer is taken from the house when the mother savagely bites him on the arm. Weeks later he sees Olalla again, but she tells him she must stay alone and suffer her family's curse as Christ bore all men's sins.

WEREWOLF FACTS: There isn't much in the way of real werewolfery but the insane mother howls likea wolf and bites like one too. The narrator never worries that he has been bitten by a werewolf and will become one too.

INTERESTING FACTS: Quite possibly the most boring werewolf story ever. The lycanthropy is hidden away and may not be anything more than insanity. The only good scene is when Olalla's idiot mother savagely bites the narrator on the wrist. Stevenson wasn't really interested in werewolves so much as he was ion talking about evil, and its survival, and cure.