The Wolf Gift

The Wolf Gift is the thirty-first novel by the American writer Anne Rice, published in February 2012 by Random House.

Reuben Golding is a well-off journalist at the fictional San Francisco Observer who is sent to write about a historic family mansion on the northern California coast, with a redwood forest behind it and the Pacific below. A chance encounter at the house ends with him being attacked and turned into a werewolf, and much of the novel follows him trying to stay ahead of the authorities, the press and the people who analyse DNA for a living while working out what he has become. Rice set the book in Northern California, where she lived for a large part of her life, and several scenes take place in a redwood forest. The story is set in the present day, and the gift of the title is the transformation itself.

Rice had published the Christ the Lord novels before this one, and she said at the time that The Wolf Gift was not a return to supernatural fiction, since those books revolved around mystical events as well.