Wladislaw Brenryk has built the life he wanted. He owns a successful shop in Ponkert, has a wife and young daughter, and has earned a reputation as a shrewd but honest merchant. Then one winter journey brings him face-to-face with creatures unlike any wolves he has ever seen. What follows leaves him bound to a pack that moves through the darkness under the command of an ancient figure known only as the master.

Wladislaw soon discovers that the creatures hunting the countryside are men who become beasts. He is now one of them. The master can summon him without speaking, compel his transformation, and force him into nocturnal hunts that leave bodies scattered across the snow. Wladislaw hates what he has become, but refusing the master carries a terrible price. When he begins quietly plotting rebellion with another reluctant member of the pack, the master strikes where Wladislaw is most vulnerable. His secret life can no longer remain separate from his home, and the monster inside him is becoming harder to control.

The Werewolf of Ponkert is unusual even among early Weird Tales horror because much of the story is told by the werewolf himself. H. Warner Munn developed the idea after H. P. Lovecraft raised the possibility of telling a werewolf story from the creature’s point of view. Munn turned that suggestion into a tale set in Hungary and published it in Weird Tales in 1925, later expanding its world into a continuing sequence of werewolf stories.

Harold Warner Munn (1903–1981) became closely associated with Weird Tales, where his fiction appeared alongside writers including Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. The Werewolf of Ponkert grew into his Tales of the Werewolf Clan sequence, while his later work included King of the World’s Edge, The Ship from Atlantis, The Banner of Joan, Merlin’s Ring, and The Lost Legion.