Tim Powers takes up the mantle of the Emilies in this, his most recent novel: My Brother's Keeper, which came out in hardcover in late 2023 and a paperback edition just a few months ago.
The obvious point of comparison is with Powers' 1989 novel The Stress of Her Regard, in which the Romantic poets (Shelley, Keats, and Byron) were involved with vampires. There was also a sequel, set a generation later, Hide Me Among the Graves, which brought the Rossetti circle into the mix. If Stress was "the Romantic poets owed their creative powers to vampires," then Keeper is "the Brontës owed their creative powers to werewolves."
Werewolves seem to be less of an obvious source of a creative muse than vampires - cool, aristocratic, long-lived, sensual, sophisticated - were, and that's one reason Keeper is not quite as successful as the vampire books. But it's still a Tim Powers novel, so it's an adept weave of actual history and invented fantasy, with his usual Catholic-tinged mythology which insists that everything - and in particular any touch of the ineffable or creative power - has a cost, and those costs run high very quickly.
The other reason, to my mind, Keeper is not as successful as Stress or even Graves is that it feels, like some of his recent novels - I'll mention Alternate Routes - lighter, less grounded, less thought-through than Powers' best books. The Brontës are somewhat caricatured here, with only Emily getting a fully-rounded treatment, and she's seen entirely in a hero-worshipping light. The prose is thinner, the world less detailed, the supernatural elements more bolted-on than in his best work like Declare or Last Call or The Anubis Gates. Keeper is not particularly short, but it feels too short for what it wants to do, like a book that needed to be about fifty percent longer and go through at least two more drafts.
After a short prologue set in 1830, and before a similarly short afterword, the book has three main parts, each covering a few days in 1846-7 (March, September, and April). The main characters are the Brontës themselves - the three then-surviving sisters and Branwell, plus their father, the local Anglican pastor Patrick - a few werewolfy villains, and Alcuin Curzon, part of an ancient Catholic order devoted to eliminating werewolves.
There is a two-person werewolf god, killed and mostly banished a century or so ago. The female half is buried under Patrick's church floor, without her head, under a stone carved with wards. The male half, called Welsh - and it's sadly typical of this novel that one main villain is unnamed and the other one is called "Welsh" and barely speaks to anyone - appears as a boy and should have been drowned in the Irish Sea, but, sadly, Patrick's grandfather saved him (not knowing the werewolf-god deal at that point) and entangling his family with the power of that biune god.
Branwell is Welsh's particular target, as the heir of the male line. As in other Powers books, Welsh plans to take over Branwell's body, rejuvenating himself and getting the energy to revive his other half. Branwell, weak-willed and hugely susceptible to flattery, falls for Welsh's promises of power and influence and creative energy over and over again, and has to be managed by his sisters, especially Emily. He also, in that prologue, did something Welsh showed him in a dream that tied the fates of Emily, Anne, and himself deeply with the werewolves, and much of the novel comes out of that action and the eventual lengths the Brontë women (Emily in particular) need to go to break that bond.
So: three sections. Each time the power of the werewolves rises, Branwell is weak and abets it, and generally Emily and Curzon (she meets him in the first section) manage to beat back the werewolf power in a way they think will be lasting...but, of course, turns out not to be. The characters share notes as they go, with Patrick providing a lot of relevant family history and Curzon explaining most of the supernatural backstory. In the third section, they finally do the final, most destructive thing - as always in Powers, magic has a huge cost - and settle it once and for all.
For a werewolf novel, we don't see wolves very much. The monsters are skeletons or ghosts or apparitions or flocks of birds for most of the book. Welsh is creepy and compelling when he speaks to Branwell, but that only happens a few times. The most important dog-like creature is Emily's constant companion Seeker, firmly on the side of the heroes. There is a scene or two of something transforming into a wolf, but these werewolves are not nearly as werewolfy as a reader expects.
There's also elements of the supernatural background that feel under-baked. The secret society that basically leeches from the power of these two werewolf gods is headquartered in London, and has some sort of leadership we never see. It's basically said flat-out that they would prefer to keep the gods "dead" (but slightly less dead than they currently are), so that they can keep siphoning power for their own purposes, but that they are being pushed by events to try to resurrect the gods to prevent them from really and finally dying. But the powers of the gods are clearly rising during this book, so I don't see why that organization doesn't pull back rather than blowing up this magical apocalypse they don't really want.
Also, how these gods connect to Powers' core Catholic theology is spikier and more confusing than in some of his books. There's a practically-spoken point that the Christian God can't save anyone from these mostly-dead werewolves, which is not a theological point I'd expect from Powers. (Having to die in the right way to reach a state of grace, absolutely. Some sacrifice too high for anyone to want to make, definitely. But not no way for faith in Yahweh to make things right.)
Tim Powers is a great writer, and even his second-rank books are fun and exciting and full of elements to think and argue about - as witness, see above. This is a second-rank book, but it's also a fairly new novel, in his core style, that I almost missed, so I'm happy I realized it existed and read it. If you haven't read Powers, though, and this material sounds interesting, hit Regard first.