If magnitude and variety of production were all that counted, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould would rank among the world's greatest authors. He wrote or contributed to well over one hundred books. These include his The Lives of the Saints (18721889) in seventeen volumes, biographies of Nero and Napoleon, collections of folklore and folk songs, around twenty travel books, and more than forty works of fiction. He was the only popular novelist of his era who was also a theologian and the only theologian who wrote a book on werewolves. Barely known today as the composer of the words for the hymns "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and "Now the Day Is Over," he once received a letter from a lady who admired his hymns but hoped that he was unrelated to "the wicked novelist of the same name."

Wicked or not, Baring-Gould as a novelist wrote some of the most graphic...