The year 2023 marked forty years of the publication of Stephen King’s novella Cycle of the Werewolf (1983). This lesser known novella written by the American master of contemporary horror was originally conceived as a calendar, with Berni Wrightson contributing the illustrations and King providing the text for each vignette, until the latter decided to turn the project into his first and only graphic novel. The lunar cycle gives the book its structure and divides it into twelve chapters as indicative of the twelve months of the year, each one reaching its climax with every full moon, when the werewolf makes its appearance. According to Tony Magistrale, if the female biological rhythms and the female potential for endowing life become more perceptible during the menses, conversely, a man’s transformation into a werewolf when the full moon rises brings to the fore instances of disturbing virility, which reveal a latent potential for destruction. In this respect, the Gothic archetype of the werewolf paves the way for exploring discourses of unsettling masculinity roaming unfettered as a counterpart to female empowerment. Besides, Cycle of the Werewolf reveals the ancestral importance attached to the land, the celestial bodies, and the rites of passage which ensure the coming of age of each of the members in a community. As Jonathan Davis argues, in his novels, King often portrays how children come of age through different rites of initiation sanctioned by their elders. In Cycle of the Werewolf, young Marty Coslaw is mentored by ageing Uncle Al into the quest of a werewolf, which comes hand in hand with the symbolic transformation of the young boy into a man, as the progression through different life stages finds reflection in the respective phases of the lunar cycle. In Danse Macabre (1981), King claims that the Gothic archetype of the werewolf is rooted in “the duality of human nature”, the mythic clash between Apollonian and Dionysian forces, with the gods exerting their respective dominion over the sun and the moon, the light and the dark, which finds its literary reification in the figure of the double within the gothic tradition. Cycle of the Werewolf explores the good and evil selves of an individual by means of his transformation from human into beast. This chapter aims to approach Stephen King’s novella Cycle of the Werewolf taking the lunar cycle and its pervasive presence throughout the book as a catalyst which unleashes the ageing process of its protagonist and orchestrates discourses of masculinity, while it endows the novella with a symbolic mythical and ancestral dimension which culminates in King’s contemporary interpretation of the lycanthropic myth as grounded in the archetype of the double in the nineteenth-century Gothic tradition and transforming it into a Gothic archetype of contemporary American horror.