Books
Published works on Equine Transformation


Dedicated novels:

Cover art: ©Gary Rudell A Wind in Cairo
Judith Tarr
1989 Bantam Books ISBN: 0-553-27609-3

A spoilt, arogant prince makes the mistake of taking advantage of a magician's daughter. Her father decrees that since he clearly has the soul of a beast, he shall have the body of one too, and transforms him into a stallion. Captured and sold to the wilful and beautiful daughter of his father's worst enemy, the transformed prince must somehow absolve himself of his crime or remain a horse forever.



Cover art: ©Steven Bennet The Grey Horse
R A MacAvoy
1988 Bantam ISBN: 0-553-17559-9

Ruari MacEibhir is a Phouka: an Irish horse faerie, able to take the form of horse or human at will. He has returned to Ireland in troubled times to seek the hand of the woman he loves.



Stallion of a Dream
Robert Vavra
1980 W.Morrow & Co Inc ISBN: 0-688-03746-1

A gypsy youth captures and befriends a beautiful Andalusian stallion. Their friendship is deep and beautiful, but the boy comes to realise he has destroyed something precious in taking the stallion's freedom. He releases the horse to run free again, but the bond between them is such that he is transformed into a black stallion to run always beside his friend.

The story is told with Robert Vavra's beautiful photography, featuring the stallion Majestad.



Cover art: ©David Miller Dun Lady's Jess
Doranna Durgin
1994 Baen Books ISBN: 0-671-87617-1

In a parallel world, Cory, a magician's courier, uses a new spell to escape an ambush: he and his mare, Dun Lady's Jess, are catapulted violently into our world. But the spell has a completely unexpected side-effect: Jess is transformed into a human woman. Terrified and incapable of speech, seperated from her rider, she must find him while coming to terms with her newly acquired human intelligence. But what will happen when she returns to her home and regains her equine shape?

Jess's story is continued in Changespell.



Cover art: ©? Devil's Donkey
Bill Brittain
1981 Harper Trophy ISBN: 0-06-440129-4

Young Dan'l Pitt doesn't believe in magic, and doesn't heed the warnings of the older residents of Coven Tree village. He doesn't believe Old Magda is a witch and he doesn't believe the old oak for which the village is named is a witches' tree. But when he lops some dead wood from it and Old Magda transforms him into a donkey for his pains, he begins to believe...



Cover art: © E.T.Steadman The Harem of Aman Akbar
Elizabeth Scarborough
1984 Bantam ISBN: 0-553-26718-3

As one of the three wishes granted by his bottled djinn, Amon Akbar asks for a harem of wives from diverse lands: there is the fair warrior princess Rasa, the beautiful black Amollia, and the petite and sharp-tongued Aster. While persuing a fourth wife of his own country, however, Aman mislays the djinn's bottle, and when it falls into another's hands, suffers a humiliating transformation into a donkey. It is up to his three wives to reunite Aman and the bottle so that the djinn may remove this curse. The only problem is that the bottle is currently held by an evil Emir who will surely kill Aman Akbar if he ever suspects that Aman's fourth choice of wife is a member of his own harem.



The Golden Ass
Lucius Apuleius
circa AD160 ISBN: various

The account, in his own words, of the author's inadvertant transformation into an ass and his subsequent, often bawdy, adventures in that form.

Also know as the Transformation of Lucius, this classic has seen many translations and is now an operatic stage play too.


Short Stories:

© Matthew Webber Mythological Beast
Stephen Donaldson
Found in Daughter of Regals by Donaldson

Norman is a perfectly sane, perfectly normal man. He lives with his perfectly normal wife and son, in a perfectly normal society. Everything is okay: his biomitter constantly assures him of this. It even assures him of this when he begins to change into a unicorn. And when it becomes obvious that the biomitters are in fact lying, and that the perfectly sane and perfectly normal society is in fact anything but, only Norman is in a position to do anything about it.


Aunt Millicent at the Races
Len Guttridge
Found in HORSES! by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois

Aunt Millicent is a young and pretty spinster librarian in a somewhat conservative Welsh village. Normally shy and retiring, she rather startles the household one day by uttering a spirited neigh during the recitation of one of Father's monotonous anecdotes. The next morning she is seen at the breakfast table trying futily to pick up knife and fork with a pair of hooves protuding from the sleeves of her dressing-gown. In short order she has completely transformed into a bay thoroughbred mare. Father, never one to miss an opportunity, promptly visits the library for everything they have on horse-racing, and sets his sister-in-law on the path of a new career.


Kehailan
Judith Tarr
Found in Arabesques by Susan Shwartz

In a return to the wonderful province of A Wind in Cairo, Judith Tarr tells the tale of Kehailen, a prince named for the pure strain of the horses of Arabia. One day he rescues a beautiful woman from the deprevations of a hideous ifrit. He wins her heart but she is promised to another. Unable to give herself to him, she grants him instead a single wish and vanishes. Kehailen, frustrated beyond endurance, rashly wishes for the fire and freedom of his namesake, and is instantly transformed into a perfect, moon-coloured Arab stallion. In this form he is brought back to his father's palace to begin a life indeed free and carefree. His father is less than enthused though, and his mamluk, Khalid, embarks upon a quest to free his master from the enchantment before he loses himself entirely in the delights of being a stallion.

The story has a sequel: Al-Ghazalah, which relates the tale of one of Kehailen's daughters, a beautiful Arab filly who may take the form of a human maiden when she chooses. How she helps her fully human brother secure his love and finds her own too.


© Tim Hildebrandt Homeward Bound
Bruce Coville
Found in The Unicorn Treasury by Bruce Coville

When Jamie's father dies, he goes to live with his uncle, a dark, unloving guardian, who forbids him to have anything to do with the long spiral horn he insists is a narwhal tooth. But Jamie is irresistably drawn to it: can feel the magic in it. When he finally lays hands on it, Jamie knows he and his late father are not what they seem, and his uncle is no uncle at all, but an evil wizard seeking to control the magic of the unicorns.




Excerpts: Single instances of equine transformation...

The Transformation of Ocyrrhoe
Metamorphoses, book II by Ovid

Ocyrrhoe is the human/nymph daughter of the centaur Chiron. A prophet, she accidentally gives away the secrets of Zeus, and in punishment, he transforms her into a mare:

Her tongue no more distinct complaint affords,
but in shrill accents and misshapen words
pours forth such hideous wailings as declare
the human girl confounded in the mare
until, by degrees accomplished in the beast,
she neighs outright and all the steed express'd.
Her stooping body on her hands is born:
her hands are turned to hooves and shod in horn.
Her yellow tresses ruffle in a mane,
And in a flowing tail she frisks her train.



Trifle not with wizards...
The Wizard of Camelot, by Simon Hawke

In a near future when society is on the verge of collapse, the wizard Merlin returns to usher in a new age of magic. A lot of people are understably sceptic, but the public humiliation of a particularly obnoxious talk-show host convinces many!

Merlin made a slight gesture with his hand and Marten's ears began to grow.
For a few moments, the audience didn't notice, and Mertens himself apparently felt nothing. He was in full rave, pointing at Merlin and calling him a fraud and demanding that he confess his real name, suggesting that if he refused, it was probably because he had a police record. Meanwhile, his ears continued to grow steadily.
The audience inevitably noticed and there were gasps and exclamations of astonishment. Martens's ears were growing more and more rapidly, becoming longer and more pointed, reaching up above his head, turning grey and sprouting fur.
He stoped abruptly, momentarily disoriented, perhaps beginning to feel something strange. Then, still holding the microphone, he raised his hands up to his ears. "What the... my ears!"
He resembled the transformation of Pinnochio, with gray, tufted donkey ears sticking up almost a full foot above his head. He dropped the mike and spun around, facing the audience, but looking up toward the control booth, where the director, whatever reactions were taking place up there, instinctively kept on calling the shots. The monitor screen before me showed a close-up of Martens, his face white as a sheet, with sweat breaking out on his ofrehead as his eyes registered first complete incomprehension, and then panic.
"My ears! What the hell's happening to my ears?"
And then Marten's nose began to grow. "What is this?" he shouted.
His teeth looked larger now, his jaw was elongating, and his hands, still clapped up to the sides of his head, were growing dark and mishapen, turning into hooves.
"Jesus Christ!" yelled Martens. "What's happening to me? Help me! Somebody help me!"
I watched, delighted beyond words, as he screamed "help me! Help me! Helllllp meeee, hawwww, heee-hawww! Hee-haw!"
His expensive suit had burst apart at the seams and he had stepped out of his shoes, his socks still on his hind legs, and he was trotting about, knocking things over as he kicked out with alarm and brayed hysterically.



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