This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, everyone, Robert Lamb here in this special omnibus edition of The Monster Fact.

We've put together all five episodes of our recent look at the werewolf in myth, legend, and media.

From prehistoric wolf interactions and the ancient world to modern media incarnations of lecanthropy.

So let's dig right in. Draw blood.

Where the limit of our campfires glow licks against the darkness of the wilds, strange forms leap and prowl.

Sometimes human, sometimes lupine, often somewhere in between.

Huddled around our cultivated flames, this nighttime sun of burning wood, we invoke the

rites of man, hot food and drink, dance and song, story, and myth.

These acts tell us who we are, and yet the creatures of the outer night tempt us to darker,

wilder orbits, places in the wilderness from which our fire would be but a pinprick of light.

They are the wildness from which we arose and might yet return, dressed in no furs but their own,

naked before no gods, nor none man still remembers.

They are our violent hearts, our erotic blood, flesh, hunger, and desire.

Suckled by the moon, the werewolves creep closer, threatening to leap

with shredding claw and ripping teeth, even as their howls urge us to cast aside our tools,

our garments, our language, tongues, and join them in the all-encompassing night.

Here we begin a multi-episode look at the werewolf,

shapeshifters who walk the line between human being and the wild wolf

in all manner of horrifying and alluring ways.

...