In the Beginning, There Were Werewolves by Katia Kozar

In the beginning, there were werewolves.

And while there were some notable depictions of the man-beasts, particularly in early monster movies, there haven’t been nearly as many books written about them as there were about vampires. 

Stephen King’s Silver Bullet, and Robert McCammon’s book The Wolf’s Hour and Whitley Streiber’s The Wolfen. and the late, great Tanith Lee’s grandly Gothic Lycanthia: Or the Children of Wolves were outliers. 

And going farther back, there was also Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris (1933) and Marie de France’s 12^th century poem “Bisclavret” about a werewolf knight. 

These works took much of their lore from folktales, and all the writers seemed to agree on the basic tropes of silver bullets and wolfsbane. 

Then came the rise of “urban fantasy” as a genre, with writers like Kim Harrison, Patricia Briggs, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Carrie Vaughn offering a new kind of werewolf to readers. 

Their protagonists weren’t always male and they were a lot sexier than the old school bestial models that had come before. 

The Twilight saga popularized the notion of werewolves having Native American roots and the movie’s use of tattoos got folded into the tropes as well. These days just try to find a werewolf that doesn’t have a tattoo! 

But werewolf books really took off with the explosion of indie publishing, and there are now two tracks of them—classic “literary horror” put out by legacy publishers (see Those Across the River by Christopher Buelman and Benjamin Percy’s Red Moon)    and indie books that use the term “shifter” and are more solidly paranormal romance. And in shifter books, pretty much anything goes as an animal alter-ego. There are still wolves, but now there are lions and tigers and bears. There are leopards and panthers and ravens. And increasingly, writers eager to experiment have offered books where their characters shift into dinosaurs or interact with alien shifters or—and this is a bit inexplicable to me—honey badgers.

Maybe because I’ve seen an actual honey badger, I just can’t suspend my disbelief that an average-sized man or woman could shift into a creature that’s less than a foot tall and weighs between eleven and thirty-five pounds fully grown.

Nor is there anything sexy about a honey badger. It’s not particularly cute like the closely related ferret or ermine. It’s an aggressive animal that eats scorpions and snakes. And while the American badger ranges all over the US, the honey badger is not a native species. Unless a book is set in sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle East, it doesn’t make sense to have a honey badger protagonist. 

If I’m reading a shifter book, I want the writer to sell me on the reality and not just ignore physics and geography and logic. I’ve written tiger and lion shifters, as well as wolves and (under a different pen name) byks, which are a minotaur-like beast out of East European mythology. But every time I do, I think about how they would fit into the world when they’re in beast form.

It’s not like someone isn’t going to notice a wild animal running around NYC. 

But then…New Yorkers are pretty jaded. It might not even be the strangest thing they see all day.

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