It’s Just a Job – Werewolf
Just like vampires, it seems specious to explain werewolves to an audience of primary paranormal readers. If you don’t know what a werewolf is by now, you’re not really a paranormal reader.
But in order to keep this series of posts complete, I’m doing a post on werewolves, just as I did one on vampires.
Unlike vampires, though, I am anything but an expert. I am not a fan of werewolves in romance fiction — not as heroes, anyway. I don’t find them sexy, hot or in any way romantic. Mutely supporting me in that claim: I had to go for pages and pages before I could find any werewolf image vaguely romantic or sexy to use for this post, whereas all the other paranormal “jobs” provided dozens of choices for me to pick from.
This is not the platform for me to get into an argument over the pros and cons of werewolves as romance heroes and heroes. I’m merely pointing out that I don’t write about them in that capacity. In fact, I have yet to incorporate werewolves in any capacity in my books, so all I know about the furry ones is from television and the rare book I’ve read that features them. So far, that limits me to Twilight, and the odd werewolf that crops up in Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris.
That’s okay. These “job” posts have only ever been designed to reduce paranormal species down to their core common denominators.
Wikipedia, interestingly enough, says that werewolves pre-date vampires in human mythology. The name derives from Old English, which is an offshoot of Norse, Saxon and a few other tongues rolled together: In other words, the Vikings were worried about shapeshifters, way back when. While vampires are a relatively modern concern, showing up in literature and mythology a few hundred years later at the earliest.
It is the Vikings who could be the reason that werewolves and shapeshifters can be found in Native American mythology, too.
Werewolves being vulnerable to silver, and responding to the phases of the moon are more modern inventions of fiction. Not all werewolves “change” either. Some versions merely take on the snarly personality of a wolf, and abuse those nearest and dearest to them before their community are forced to “deal” with them — often fatally. But the most consistent “facts” about werewolves are their superhuman strength and agility, and their loss of concern for laws, community and their loves ones — they become creatures without conscience.
This is a marked difference from the way most romance novels treat werewolves, especially those wolves who are heroes and heroines — a fact that Wikipedia overlooked altogether, referring only to their popularity in horror.
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Just like the other popular paranormal species, I have no intention of trying to list titles of romance novels that feature werewolves.
However, this page on Amazon is a link to all romance titles at Amazon associated with werewolves. I even sorted the page by lowest prices to high, so all the free titles will be listed first. 😉
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