Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s The Undying Monster (1922) is a strange and compelling early werewolf novel that blends Gothic horror, detective fiction, Norse mythology, occultism, psychology, and the lingering trauma of the First World War. Set in the aftermath of the war, the novel follows Oliver Hammand and his sister Swanhild as they confront a mysterious creature that has haunted their aristocratic family for generations. As investigators pursue the Monster through family history, folklore, hypnosis, archaeology, and supernatural theories, the novel increasingly asks whether its horror is truly external or whether it emerges from inherited memory, trauma, guilt, and belief.

North Meridian Press presents this edition as an act of literary recovery, bringing a relatively forgotten but remarkably ambitious work back into circulation. Historian B.J. Bruther provides annotations and accompanying scholarly essays that situate Kerruish’s novel within the history of werewolf literature while examining its treatment of gender, class, trauma, occultism, and its influence on later representations of the werewolf. Together, the restored novel and Bruther’s scholarship invite contemporary readers to reconsider Kerruish not simply as a writer of forgotten supernatural fiction, but as an important and unusual voice in the development of modern horror.