Gonna be honest, I’m sharing the rest of the Mayfair Chill books this week primarily because of their covers. I really enjoy Joe DeVelasco’s art – it has a lot of Pirhanna Press/early Vertigo comics vibes and I think in a lot of ways (along with some other key games from 89/90) it predicts the art direction of White Wolf’s World of Darkness games. (I feel like a lot of aesthetic and attitude in comics and games from 1990-95 springs, knowingly or otherwise, from Dave Louapre and Dan Sweetman’s Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, but this is just a gut feeling).

Anywho, this is Lycanthropes (1991), a sourcebook for, well, lycanthropes (on the spine of the book is a phonetic pronunciation of the word and I can’t decide if it is helpful or patronizing). The book starts with a pretty excellent essay on lycanthrope folklore, complete with a gloss on most if not all documented cases. The bulk of the book is devoted to case files on NPC lycanthropes, which establishes several different sorts of lycanthropy (psychological, inherited, infectious, magical, astral and whatever the wolfen are). Two scenarios round out the book, one based on the real world Beast of Exmoor legends that continue to fuel belief that some kind of previously unknown big cat hunts in southwest England. Its actually pretty cool.

The interior layout is pretty bare bones. A lot of the original art consists of poor crops of larger paintings. There also seem to be a lot of blank spots where art should have gone, but was dropped for budget or deadline concerns. Not a sexy book by far, but nevertheless a pretty good werebeast resource.