This is the 1983 first edition of Cycle of the Werewolf, by Stephen King and illustrated by the legendary Bernie Wrightson. I don’t know much about collectible King books, but this is among my favorite things by both King and Bernie, so when I saw it at a local rummage sale, I snapped it up and ran it to the cashier like a football player.

The book got its start when Christopher Zavisa approached King at a convention and pitched him on a novelty calendar pegged to a werewolf story that ran the course of a year. That didn’t really work out format-wise, but it eventually became a novella broken into twelve monthly vignettes about a werewolf terrorizing a town over the course of a single year. Wrightson’s art accompanies the proceedings and is just absolutely fantastic. Epoch-defining werewolf, as far as I’m concerned. And that’s why the Land of Enchantment edition is so special — the mass market version is digest size, so the art is smaller. Here, its in all its A4 glory, big, boldly colored, finely detailed. Absolutely gorgeous. Almost an entirely different experience to read.

Some of the writing is a little wobbly, not gonna lie, especially before the plot really gels. Still, the twist is still pretty novel, and it just vibrates on the same particular frequency that makes King’s early, shorter work so good in my estimation. A real classic. And the source of a solid film adaptation, too!