To enter a new myth is a moment of initiation. One must return to the moment before myth, when the myth of anyone might still become the myth of any other. It is to enter the room which is both tomb and womb, to become innocent of everything except the motivation for myth. – Maya Deren, avant-garde film-maker
Genres: Psychology/Bipolar, Metaphysical, Religion, Mythology, Memoir
Publication by Running Wild / RIZE Press in May 2026.
Questions for Werewolves: A Creative Nonfiction of Madness, Witch and Daimon is an odyssey of bipolar depression, inspired by Greek underworld myths and world religion. It is an intimate and poetic chronicle of a mind undone – and remade – through myth, madness and the search for the sacred.
In Los Angeles in 1998, the author begins hearing voices that pierce the fabric of his ordinary life. A murder back home triggers fragmented premonitions about the death of a woman he once knew, and sends him into a psychic freefall. Refusing to turn away from the rupture, he follows the voices into a pilgrimage across cultures and continents, saints and sinners — to the Black Virgin, the enigmatic Madonna of many names, who gathers the world’s shadows. A wolf appears as a dream guide into the mystic and protean dark.
As motifs from Greek underworld myth entwine with his inner and biographical life, he sounds out the names of Persephone, Artemis, and Dionysos — who illuminate daimonic forces at work in the dark of depression and psychosis. What emerges through diverse voices that blur boundaries and expectations of literary genre is a story of descent and return, revealing how the darkest experiences of madness can become portals to intuition, spiritual yearning, and the possibility of an indestructible inner life.
Early Praise
“In his Questions for Werewolves Forrest Wolfe explores the spiritual, cultural and mythological lands we have inhabited since ‘illud tempus’, the realm of sacred time. Through a haunting polyphony of voices and fragments, the author connects to the layers of dreams, melancholia and madness hidden in all of us, and shows how these shape our relations to real and imaginary others. Highly advisable for those who search for words and a landscape where their dark thoughts and intuitions may resonate.”
—Wouter Kusters, author of A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking
Table of Contents
Black Light
the emperor
black veils
the loups garous
the minotaur
unspeakable
nameless continent
persephone
The Black and the White
a comedy of saints
the names
grand cemetery
war of light
how dark thoughts came into the human heart
hell’s gate
the baron
the year that ends in one dark day
The Black Virgin
the palmistry of wood
white fire
lost city
the star
the daimon
epilogue: depression and shamanic themes