Questions for Werewolves Book Review
“Question for werewolves: A Creative Non-Fiction of Madness, Witch and Daimon,” is a text fit for night-reading, when all the world is sleeping and the soul has the will to want to wander. Published in May 2026 by Running Wild & RIZE Press, Forrest Wolfe presents a brave and deeply original memoir that traces a pilgrimage through bipolar depression.
Drawing on underworld mythology and personal experience, Forrest Wolfe recounts a period in 1998 when, while working on a film in Los Angeles, unsettling omens, voices, and premonitions began to haunt his daily life, triggering a profound psychological and spiritual crisis. Rather than dismissing these experiences, Wolfe follows them into a parabolic landscape populated by figures such as Persephone, Artemis, and Dionysos, guided by the recurring image of a wolf and his quest for the Black Virgin, the alluring Madonna who appears across various cultures and traditions.
Blending memoir, mythology, philosophy, and religious inquiry, the narrative explores the fluid boundaries between madness and revelation. As philosopher Wouter Kusters observes, the book inhabits the realm of sacred time, connecting dreams, melancholia, and visionary experience through a haunting collective of voices and fragments. Kusters comments:
“Having attended high school with the author and having read an early version of the manuscript, I found “Questions for Werewolves” to be an honest, intelligent, and deeply affecting work whose poetic insight transforms personal suffering into a wider meditation on faith, divine longing, and the enduring mystery of the soul. The result is a haunting and thought-provoking memoir that lingers long after its final page.”
Likewise, during my reading of Wolfe’s creative non-fiction, many episodes became visceral to me and stayed with me long after having finished the book.
Divided into three parts, Part I: Blacklight, Part II: The Black and the White, and Part III: The Black Virgin, “Questions for Werewolves” blends together the depths of the human psyche and spirit with supernatural archetypes in an original and thought-provoking journey. What at first appears as descent, becomes apparent throughout the navigation of the author’s lifeline as rather, an ascent into the far-reaches of the mind and soul.
The structure of “Questions for Werewolves” maps an overarching movement through darkness toward meaning, with each part title plotting a distinct phase in the narrator's descent and transformation. “Part I: Blacklight” evokes a self-contradictory luminescence. What is hidden becomes revealed, like ultraviolet light, this section suggests the emergence of suppressed memories, psychic wounds, and altered states of perception associated with bipolar disorder. Wolfe begins to see what lies beneath the surface of ordinary reality. “Part II: The Black and the White” signals a confrontation with dualities, sanity and madness, despair and hope, body and spirit, self and other. The title recalls alchemical traditions in which the blackening and whitening stages represent decomposition followed by purification. Rather than offering easy resolutions, this section inhabits the tension between opposing forces, reflecting the memoir's exploration of mental illness as a condition that resists simple binaries. Finally, “Part III: The Black Virgin” introduces an archetype of compassion and spiritual endurance. Unlike the darkness of the earlier sections, the darkness embodied by the Black Virgin is sacred rather than threatening. She represents a wisdom born from suffering, a maternal presence capable of guiding Wolfe through the underworld. Together, these titles suggest that the memoir is not ultimately a story of overcoming darkness but of learning to dwell within it.
Writing under the pen name Forrest Wolfe, Luke Blanchford brings a distinctive blend of intellectual depth and lived experience to his work. A Taiwanese-American writer who has lived successfully with bipolar disorder for more than twenty-five years, Wolfe draws upon a life shaped by both personal struggle and professional accomplishment. He holds a degree in Philosophy from Princeton University and an MFA in Film from the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, educational foundations that inform his engagement with questions of identity, spirituality, and the complexities of the human mind.
After a short career in film, Wolfe established himself as a technology and management consultant, bringing an analytical precision that complements the emotional and philosophical richness of his writing. Through his work, Wolfe explores the intersections of mental health, mythology, religion, and culture with honesty and compassion, offering readers a subtle perspective that resists sensationalism in favour of deeper human understanding.
Published by Running Wild & RIZE Press, his writing joins a catalogue known for championing distinctive literary voices and cross-genre works that challenge conventional boundaries while remaining accessible to a broad readership.
Based in Los Angeles, California, Running Wild & RIZE Press has built a distinctive place within independent publishing by promoting unconventional, boundary-pushing stories that resist easy categorization. Founded and led by Lisa Kastner, the press publishes a wide range of fiction and nonfiction, including literary fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, memoir, poetry, and historical fiction.
RIZE Press, in particular, is dedicated to amplifying the voices of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ writers, seeking manuscripts that bring underrepresented perspectives and original storytelling to the forefront. Together, the presses have cultivated a catalogue that embraces diverse narratives, literary experimentation, and socially engaged writing, providing a home for stories that challenge conventions while remaining deeply invested in the power of compelling, character-driven narratives.
Wolfe's interest in myth as a framework for understanding mental suffering extends beyond the memoir itself and is evident in his public scholarship. In his Morbid Anatomy lecture, “Dionysos and the Sadness of Our Times,” he examines the ancient Greek deity Dionysos as a figure who dissolves boundaries between life and death, destruction and renewal, proposing that contemporary society might find "new ways to summon a Dionysian response to our collective depression and ecological catastrophe today." This fascination with mythic transformation permeates “Questions for Werewolves,” where the author’s experiences of bipolar depression are not confined to medical or diagnostic language but are reimagined through archetype and spiritual encounter. Like the Dionysian mysteries that Wolfe explores in his lecture, the memoir treats madness as a transitional state.
The wolf, witch, and daimon figures that populate the narrative function much like the ancient symbols of Dionysian religion, guiding the narrator through cycles of fragmentation and renewal. By placing personal suffering within a broader mythological and cultural tradition, Wolfe challenges contemporary narratives of mental illness, suggesting that healing may emerge not only through treatment but also through meaning-making and a renewed engagement with the mysteries that have long helped humans confront despair.
The Black Virgin who appears in “Questions for Werewolves” draws upon a centuries-old religious and cultural tradition that stretches across Europe and the Mediterranean. Black Madonnas, dark-skinned depictions of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, have been venerated since the Middle Ages and are found in hundreds of shrines throughout France, Spain, Poland, Germany, and Eastern Europe. While some scholars attribute their dark coloration to age, candle smoke, or the materials from which they were made, others have interpreted the figures symbolically, associating them with ancient earth goddesses, fertility cults, and the mysteries of death and rebirth that predate Christianity. The Black Madonna has been sought after as a source of healing, for protection and for miraculous intervention. Throughout Europe, Black Virgins have often been linked to pilgrimage sites, caves, mountains, and liminal landscapes.
In Wolfe's memoir, the Black Virgin functions not merely as a religious symbol but as an archetypal presence that accompanies the narrator through darkness. Like the Dionysian figures that fascinate Wolfe in his scholarly work, the Black Virgin embodies a paradox. She is both sorrow and consolation, descent and resurrection, madness and wisdom. Her appearance situates Wolfe's struggle with bipolar disorder within a much older tradition of spiritual journeys through pain, suggesting that suffering can become a site of revelation rather than merely a condition to be overcome. In this context, the Black Virgin emerges as a guide through the underworld of the self, a maternal figure whose darkness is not a sign of despair but of endurance and transformation.
Wolfe's search for the Black Virgin ultimately becomes more than a pilgrimage toward a sacred feminine figure. His pursuit evolves into a quest for the daimon, the intermediary presence that guides the soul through suffering and transformation. “She who leads us to our daimon. Our counterpart. Our oracular guide to the psyche’s nameless continent.” Daimon do not haunt and terrorize, they lead, they point the way through the ethereal. Throughout “Questions for Werewolves,” the Black Virgin occupies a space amongst the ethereal, also the space between polarity, between grief and revelation. She embodies the dark mysteries of descent that must be embraced rather than overcome. From this encounter emerges the concept of Wolfe’s daimon, a guiding intelligence that accompanies the narrator through bipolar depression and spiritual crisis. The daimon are a point of initiation into the unknown or something higher. Wolfe writes:
“If major depression is a descent past the brink, perhaps a journey more thoroughly undertaken through death and resurrection can be cured. I have tried to write about this path, but these difficult connections between wildness, death and transformation cannot be regarded analytically. They must be lived through. The Greek gods of Persephone, Artemis, and Dionysos weave together like a laurel crown at the end of grief, perhaps only after life’s most bitter losses have initiated us. The daimon is there to guide us.”
To Wolfe, these daimon are not the blood-hounds of chaos. Daimon are grounded, they will lead us home to ourselves. Rather than offering easy redemption, Wolfe suggests that healing arises through initiation into the darkest regions of the self, where ancestral memory and visionary experience converge. The daimon serves not as a supernatural escape from suffering but as a companion through it, steering the narrator toward a deeper relationship with the psyche's hidden terrain and the possibility of spiritual rebirth.
If the daimon functions as a guide through the psyche's hidden territories, Wolfe's vision expands beyond the individual soul to encompass humanity's estranged relationship with the natural world. Having explored the daimon as an intermediary between dream, spirit, and consciousness, “Questions for Werewolves” turns toward an ecological and mythic imagination in which the repressed forces of the earth return in unsettling forms. Wolfe writes, “What, or who, are the zombies? They are neither living nor dead, but undead. I have the foolish notion that the zombies are the earth itself, become alive, and now raging against the human walls. Since even humans belong to the earth, the zombies must be the black mother herself, rising through the human, to devour the human. Within these walls, we have made the black mother into a slow enemy of social life.” Here, the zombie ceases to be merely a figure of popular horror and becomes a potent symbol of the consequences of alienation from the living world. The image recalls the Black Virgin and the dark feminine mysteries that permeate the memoir, yet the maternal presence now appears not as guide but as forceful return.
The “black mother” emerges as an underworld power that civilization has attempted to suppress and estrange from everyday life. The earth has become a neglected sacred presence whose reappearance unsettles the boundaries between the raw self and societal expectations of self. Wolfe's meditation suggests that the psychological divisions explored through the daimon are mirrored in broader cultural divisions, where modernity's efforts to distance itself from the dark, fertile, and cyclical realities of existence ultimately produce forms of haunting and return. The daimon may direct the seeker inward, but the black mother compels a reckoning with the larger ecological and spiritual forces from which no human life can remain separate.
Wolfe shares a story he encountered during his journey, a story of two birds.
“There are two birds. There is the bird who watches. This is the spirit bird. And there is his brother, the bird who desires. One day, the bird of desire fell from the sky, and got snared in the mud. As he struggled and flapped harder in the mud, he became stuck. His brother in the sky looked down and heard his fallen brother. But as the bird of desire got stuck, he began to forget he came from the sky. He became a creature of mud. Before the mud consumed him, he shouted as if to no one, “Do not become like me.” In the vanishing point is a gaze from a beautiful darkness that imparts a shudder of fear and trembling.”
That is what happens as we struggle and become cemented in the mud around us, we forgot that we came from the sky. Wolfe reminds us, through his own questioning and pursuits, life is not what we always think it appears to be.
To end, Wolfe opened one segment with this quotation: “Wolves howl into night/ yearning without why.” Perhaps, that is what is happening, in processing our pain and singular human experiences through art. We are howling out into the expanse of a great night, we are wanting, yearning, sometimes we have to be satisfied not knowing the ‘what’ yet, or the ‘why.’
Thank you to Luke Blanchford for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.
