Originally published in 1919, The Door of the Unreal is one of the first true werewolf classics, and helped to pave the way for the 'golden age' of the genre, which flourished in the two decades following the publication of Gerald Biss's novel. At the time he wrote the novel—his one foray into supernatural fiction—Biss was largely covering uncharted territory: most of the now-familiar conventions of the werewolf tale had yet to be set in stone, and the author was not working to the type of narrow pattern which constrained many writers of vampire tales in the years following the publication of Dracula. As Stefan Dziemianowicz writes in his introduction: 'The Door of the Unreal . . . reminds us of a time when one of horror's classic themes had not yet been forced into a rigid mould shaped by genre expectations, and when the plot of a horror tale was limited by nothing more than the imagination of writers like Gerald Biss.'
H. P. Lovecraft called this novel one of the children of Dracula, a novel that did for werewolves what Dracula did for vampires.
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