Why Werewolves?

I’ve written four books so far, and all of them have been about werewolves. The future is unclear, but I’m hoping to write at least a few more werewolf books. A decent amount of my shorter stories are on the same topic. But why?

There’s a simple, practical answer, and a longer, more esoteric one. The simple answer is that I just sort of fell into it. In early 2019, my girlfriend at the time loved the werewolf genre, and frequently talked about what she was watching or reading. At the same time, my recurring vertigo problems had flared up again, and I spent the first three months basically confined to laying on the couch.

As a result, I had a lot of spare time on my hands, which I filled by watching roller derby, but it wasn’t long before that grew boring, and there just weren’t that many books or movies about roller derby. So, if there wasn’t any roller derby content out there, she said, I should make my own.

Since I was writing this for her, I decided to write a little story from the perspective of “what if a werewolf was playing roller derby?” She loved it. I showed it to my fiance (I’m polyamorous) and he also loved it. The two of them convinced me to turn it into a longer piece of fiction, which became my first book.

By then, I had kind of become obsessed with werewolves myself. The first book became a trilogy, and then after a few failed non-werewolf book attempts, I went back to a topic that excited me and started the Rock Mesa books, which also started as a collection of short stories.

So the practical answer is that I simply fell into it. I’ve tried writing other, non-werewolf books, but nothing’s really stuck with me as much as werewolf books have. What about the more esoteric answer?

I think werewolves as a literary device are tragically underutilized in modern fiction. I haven’t read much of the genre, but by and large you have your horror werewolves, in which a person is bitten, loses their humanity, goes on a rampage, and ends up dying or hiding in the woods, and then you have your romance werewolves, where a woman is seduced by a brutish but handsome alpha male. There are, as always, exceptions, but a great deal of the werewolf genre fits broadly within those two buckets.

This leaves a ton of room for innovation! Werewolves are almost always depicted as being unknown to the rest of humanity, either due to their rarity (horror) or some profound and archaic cover-up (romance). What if humanity was aware of the existence of werewolves? How would society view them? Would they be feared or praised or hunted to be studied?

So much of the romance side of the genre focuses on the concept of the pack, and alpha male, and these rigid, hierarchical structures. Looking at it from a queer perspective, shouldn’t we be able to find more examples of a pack as a supportive found family, where “alpha” is used as a term of endearment, rather than a title? (I will note that Bitten seems to kind of straddle this line, at least from what I’ve read so far)

There are very few facts that we all tend to agree on when it comes to werewolves. A bite turns you into one, silver kills them, full moons cause them to change shape, and that’s about it. For all the blank space on that canvas, we’ve spent an awful lot of time detailing a handful of very specific places and leaving the rest blank. As frustrating as that can be as a reader, it’s also incredibly exciting for an author.

That’s why I really enjoy writing werewolf fiction. Not only is it something that’s deeply personal to me, but I constantly get the feeling that I’m putting something out into the world that hasn’t really been done before, helping to fill in more of that blank canvas.