When I was a teenager, and well into graduate school, I read considerably more science fiction and fantasy than I do now. Some of the SF/F stories I read 35 to 45 years ago have stuck in my mind, and one of those was ‘There Shall Be No Darkness’ by James Blish.
It appears that Blish himself was somewhat dismissive of this story, as being early work. Well, I’ve also revisited early writing and thought “I could do it better now” and in several cases I’ve returned to the work to revise it. But if a reader retains the sense of a story over several decades, in the face of literally thousands of other books read since, the story has some power.
‘There Shall Be No Darkness’ is a werewolf story featuring mortal peril and a whiff of fated, possibly tragic love. No doubt that’s why it stuck for me.
Photo by Анатолий Чесноков on Unsplash
The next such story with staying power, for me, was ‘Kitty and the Midnight Hour’ by Carrie Vaughn. I read the whole series, and while the worldbuilding required suspension of disbelief (anytime you have to resort to both science and magic to account for the existence of your characters, some hand-waving is required), I stayed with it because the sociopolitical reality of it worked for me, as well as the central love story.
There are shifter stories at every point on the romance spectrum from military thrillers to cozy comedies. Two werewolf things I’ve read recently made me want to talk about the subgenre.
First up, ‘Unacceptable Risk’ by Kaje Harper, a M/M series starter in which a human veterinarian falls for the werewolf MC just as his pack is imploding thanks to the machinations of a vicious, ambitious bigot. The love story is thoughtful and the world-building is very good (werewolf mythology can be an eyeroll for me, but Kaje creates internal logic). This series appears to be about the extinction burst moment, when a politicoreligious structure faced with societal / cultural change doubles down on dogma to the point of killing its own dissenters / nonconformists. If only that moment produced actual extinction of the dogma. Too much violence for me to continue the series (at least right now, given IRL politics), but very well written. Definitely memorable, recommended for those who can embrace the grim.
Then I read the entire ‘Hollowood’ series of four M/M novellas by Will Forrest. These also deal with dogma, but in a much more palatable way for me, obviously, since I binge-read the series. Three of them center on romances, each of which becomes background to book 4, in which a mystery undercurrent becomes the central plot. Well constructed, well balanced, variously sexy, and the last book is a legit thriller.
I often cringe at the fated-mates mythos of shifter worlds, because of the consent problem. In ‘48 Hours in Hollowood’ this is directly addressed: the werewolves in question reject their community’s attempt to force them into union. Both leave the community; one meets a human (or so he thinks …) and falls in love. ‘48 Hours’ picks up years into their marriage, when the fated-mates issue raises its head again, and this time they approach it differently. Suffice to say the book ends with a 3-person menage.
The next title, ‘What Happens in Hollowood,’ is a young-adult romance. The third, ‘Leaving Hollowood,’ is a cross-species romance involving characters with pretty severe self-image problems for whom the course of true love does not run smoothly. These first three stories all deliver brief scenes of peril, with reference to a mysterious facility in the next valley.
The final novella, ‘The Truth About Hollowood,’ departs from the lighter tone and single POV of the other three. Here we have alternating POVs from a new character and from one of the non-POV MCs of the first book, about whom we learn Many Things. The primary plot involves that mysterious facility in the next valley, its evil practices and aims, and the actions taken by the shifter community, the FBI, and MI5 to take it down. As I mentioned, this is a legit thriller. Characters who we’ve come to love in the previous stories are in real danger. It’s also another love story, with roots in the troubled military history of the new main character.
My personal rating for the series, read as a whole, is 5 stars.
Will I ever write a shifter story myself? Probably not; the spec-fic ideas I’ve had lead in other directions. For me, werewolf world-building works best as a metaphor, a way to examine humanity. Because let’s face it: humans are greedy, violent, destructive, intolerant primates who do plenty of damage without turning into wolves (or bears, or honey badgers). But when we place stories in imagined worlds, we can talk about things that we sometimes don’t want to acknowledge IRL.
From the first hominid tribe that decided to care for its member with a broken femur, such that this member lived long enough for the bone to heal, there’s been hope that human society can be a force for good. Sometimes we just need to clothe that hope in a different skin.