crockpotcauldron | Entries tagged with werewolves

I have completed Log Bag. https://www.instagram.com/p/B6TpCtTjBgp/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

I had a quarter yard of this nice tree bark print - you can see a scrap of it in the bluejay quilted tray, if you nose around my Instagram. I got it for paper pieced wolves, which I swear will still happen! They're just taking the scenic route into existence. Anyway, wood grain quilting looks absolutely fantastic with that fabric. I was aiming for ye olde flat zip pouch and then I was like "...log?" and added round end pieces, and here we are. I even added lining end pieces to make everything perfectly neat inside, since my dad is one of those people who won't stop picking at frayed edges. It used to drive him nuts when I mended the knees of my jeans with raw edged patches. Anyway, faking up my own pattern and measurements and design is a bit terrifying for me - I have old favorite tutorials I follow step by step, year after year. But it worked! It's a little wonky, but hey, it's a log. It's bigger than a pencil case, so he can fit his woodcarving tools and spoons in there if he wants.

So that's the end of the highest priority presents. I've got one more I'd like to knock out soonish - a squid pencil pouch from Choly Knight's tutorial, super cute - and then two more presents for probably some time in January. One of em's gonna be a lighthouse zipped pouch, and the jury is still out on the other one. I'm doing fantastic this year. I will be able to kick back and enjoy my comics and my cookie baking and not stay up late on Christmas Eve galloping the sewing machine.

Of course, I might still take the sewing machine out for a recreational trot. I was about to make a small cute needle book for myself last night, but I ran into some difficulties and wound up just punching holes in index cards for the needles, and stuffing em into the red cigarette case I inherited from my grandma. It's certainly a more practical solution, but not as cute. Ah well. There are still dwarves to make, at any rate.

I've frisked the library for any new werewolf stuff, and come across This Is Not A Werewolf Story, which swears it is based on the story of Bisclavret. Friends, it is not. This werewolf was heterosexual. Furthermore, the story was absolutely littered with shifters that were not werewolves - cougars, ravens, orcas, you name it. The only Bisclavret parallel came about three hundred pages in, when the stolen-clothes plot started, and even then, it was the barest scraping of a parallel - basically, just the clothes-related transformation (and even then it took a lot of liberties), and the theft, the scene with the king's boots, the attack on the wife, and the return of the clothing. Bisclavret was a boy attending a boarding school, Bisclavret's treacherous wife was just a new boy at school (the protag's love interest was a separate character, and a girl), the king was just the kid's dad, and the kid's mom was trapped in wolf form and hanging out with him on the weekends, and the kid's werecougar great-uncle was the villain of the plot? It was a mess. I am very annoyed at this for being heterosexual, mucking with the werewolf mythology, and not even remotely following the themes of the lai. Ah well. I'm sure somebody would like it. But dangit, it stripped out all the things I like in a werewolf story, and added so many of the things I do not like.

Alright, here we go! A big old pile of cheap woofs. I have, technically, twelve of em, so that works out to four bucks. Let's see how well I spent it.

First out of the gate is Moonstruck, which is very adorable. Big fluffy lesbian werewolf barista protagonist. I'm not gonna bother giving star ratings to these, so let's just say I found it very enjoyable, but am not passionate about it.

Next, some sort of Marvel Who's Who or Encyclopedia, with the cover ripped off. It ranges from Molecule Man to Owl, but I bought it purely for the one page containing Deadly Nightshade. I just really enjoy having snoopy little insider details like her height (5'4") and strength level (Nightshade has the normal human strength of a woman of her age, height, and guild who engages in moderate regular exercise). There are technically probably no actual werewolves involved in this comic, since Nightshade just makes em, and is not one herself. There's an outside possibility Marvel has some sort of werewolf character whose name starts with something from Mo to Ow, I guess?

I picked up Legend for its talking dogs, which I consider close enough to werewolves to add this to the pile. I mean, it's not like werewolf literature is famous for its accurate depictions of wolf anatomy or psychology in the first place. This one's a bit grim, though! Postapocalyptic and full of murder and weird cat mysticism. This one might not be a keeper. I did like Animal Rites: Beasts of Burden, though.

Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre just barely squeaks in with some Wolfmen. I mean, they're all werewolves, but the plot is mostly about Dracula and a copyright infringement suit. Lots of lawyer shop talk, no woofing. I am not particularly the audience for urban fantasy: courtroom edition.

The Boogieman looks like someone's first indie scribbles. Not particularly good, I'm afraid. Does feature an actual werewolf, at least, though he seems to be set up to be the protagonist's sidekick in future issues. Can't promise I'll read em.

Cat Claw technically features the leg of a werewolf cameo on the last page, so I feel obliged to mention it here, though his actual introduction is in the next issue. He's one of those anthro wolf types, not a flat-faced Wolfman, and he does transform (as I learned from reading the following issues I found online), but he's a mad science whoopsie like Cat Claw, and has no further connections to werewolf mythology.

Speaking of werewolf mythology, I gotta look into Hellboy or something. I have the feeling there's gonna be at least one werewolf involved. Jim Henson's Storyteller series has that feeling too.

Back to werewolves, Jughead: the Hunger seems to be about the entire cast of Archie turning into werewolves in a horrible bloodbath? I have no idea why this comic happened, but it's really gross.

The Astounding Wolf-Man looks cute, and features a fresh werewolf rampaging around, but there isn't much in the copy I got, just a quick origin story. Free comic book day issue, you know how it goes. I'm going to check out the next issue.

Someone at the comic book sale recommended X-Force to me for werewolf content, but warned me about the thick eye-dialect Scottish accent on the werewolf, and the fact that she's a homophobe who swore revenge on her gay ex. I didn't get it, and I don't think I'm gonna give that one a shot.

I did get Rise of Magic: Possesses Megalith, which is a lovingly drawn werewolf punch-em-up involving a group of werewolf demon spirits trying to take over a superhero. Points for originality! I'm gonna read the next one to see how it goes.

3 Devils has the hilarious problem of someone rescuing a Wolfman-looking gentle werewolf from enslavement in a freak show, only to find out he also turns into a full moon rampage werewolf! I've never seen a double werewolf before, but I love this. Totally reading the next one.

I picked up a couple Mad-Dog comics. They have a gimmick where half is a tongue in cheek goofy superhero like early Batman, and the other half is a tortured vigilante with the same name. I checked the Wiki, and it's some sort of confusing matryoshka of references. Anyway, there's some gorgeous Ty Templeton art, and I like both halves of the comic, though they have absolutely nothing to do with each other and are very confusing to read together.

So, out of twelve comics, I only got a couple stinkers, and I'm happy with the majority of them. Good job, past me. I've got an early morning, so I needed to stop reading werewolf comics and go to bed fifteen minutes ago. Ah well! Some things are worth staying up for.

The cover has a holographic silver title and five purple wolves on it, so I figured I was in for a good time.

Friends, I was in for a mediocre time.

This book is a paranormal romance, so there's a little bit of werewolves and a lot of fucking. Sometimes both - one time they're going for third base while driving, and they run over a werewolf. Anyway, our protagonist, Dr. Elise Hanover, is a (secret werewolf) scientist trying to cure lycanthropy. Her love interest is formerly her college boyfriend, and currently FBI Agent Nic Franklin, here to investigate some woofs. Not a bad setup! Not only do they have some sexual tension and angst, but they also have great believable chemistry from having already dated and fucked. Much more satisfying than insta-lust. I gotta say, this is one of the few romance novels I've read where the protagonist seems genuinely attracted to her love interest. She's not just on fire with generic horniness and desperate to be touched, she's drooling over the way his chest hair curls around his nipples and wistfully remembering how she used to jerk him off. It's refreshing to see a protagonist express attraction to a man's body, and not just ye olde hard glistening abs. The actual sex scenes, though... "One deep thrust and I was no longer a virgin. The werewolf thing was going to be a little harder to get rid of." Ouch.

On the paranormal romance angle, this story is several books into a series, and you can tell. The previous protagonists are hanging around all coupled up and lovey dovey, taking up way too much page space with their cameos and rivalries and drama. And you can kinda tell the author was not prepared to write Dr. Woof as a protagonist - she forces a sudden character change from her "ice queen" personality in previous books to a warmer, funnier, more emotionally volatile persona, because judging from the ex-protagonists hanging around, that's the perspective Lori Handeland is comfortable writing from. The leader of the organization is also experiencing the same abrupt character changes as he gets more pagetime and relationships. It was pretty awkward.

How about the paranormal half of paranormal romance? Unfortunately, the werewolf science is just not much good. I can respect the virus angle... but you gotta actually say science words besides making up a cover story "studying a new strain of rabies in the wolf population" and saying "I had invented a serum that eased a werewolf's craving for human blood on the night of a full moon. As well as a counteragent that eradicated the virus if the victim was injected before their first change." For starters, these werewolves are a magic-science hybrid - they live forever, and they are indisputably Evil because they have a demon spirit of rage inside them or some shit. Not sure why the secret monster hunting organization bothered having the scientist come up with science to cure magical demon bloodlust, really. You would think they'd have a witch on staff for that. The serums and counteragents and shit are basically written as potions anyway. Anyway, the whole werewolf science thing wound up being a wash - she gets a magic wolf talisman that helps her transform effortlessly, and after having a soul-melding near-death experience she suddenly comes to terms with being a werewolf and develops the magical ability to de-woof any werewolf (virus and demon and everything). This was absolutely not what I signed up for with a werewolf scientist protagonist.

This book is another entry in the Sterile Werewolves category, incidentally. For no particular reason - they're just like "werewolves can't breed." Didn't even throw out an excuse about chromosomes. Our protagonist, Dr. Woof, is the very first born werewolf, because her pregnant mom got bitten in the stomach and went into early labor. Lycanthropy via amniotic fluid is a new one - or did the werewolf bite the placenta? No idea, it's very vague. Dr. Woof grew up perfectly human and non-evil, until falling in love in college apparently changed her body chemistry enough to turn her into a werewolf. See what I mean about the science being extremely dodgy? Anyway, I've come up with a more plausible reason why werewolves don't breed - in this book, every time a werewolf touches a werewolf, they get a strong static shock zap of "hey, that's a werewolf." I'd say there are no puppies because nobody wants to get zapped.

The really frustrating part of this book for me was the worldbuilding - so many good ideas, and absolutely no follow-through! The book says werewolves prefer to live in packs... and every werewolf in the book is alone, with no pack structure or social life. The book says real wolves and werewolves don't get along... and real wolves are never relevant to the plot. The book says werewolves and crows work together... but never shows a werewolf interacting with a crow. The book drops tantalizing hints about familiar spirits that turn human when you are a wolf... but goes into no detail. It feels like this book intended to be a way cooler werewolf book, but never dishes out more than a soundbyte of werewolf lore. There's a big dramatic reveal when Dr. Woof transforms in front of Agent Hottie and runs away, and then... they just has a conversation later when she's human, to the tune of "eh, you're still cool even if you are furry some amount of the time." He does not look her in the eyes while she is a wolf and acknowledge her humanity or his affection, or how cool werewolves are. He doesn't throw sticks for her while she's a wolf, or buy a fleacomb. I feel like if you're dating a werewolf, you gotta sign on for the whole package, you know?

Ah well. It was a good way to pass the time, and I had some entertaining conversations with my friends. Those five purple wolves never showed up and hung out with each other. A lot of things never showed up in this book. Three stars, I guess?

DOGFUCKERY ALERT

Fair warning.

So, here's the plot: a shallow party girl gets turned into a dog by an angry drunk homeless guy with uncontrollable magical powers. Her friends and family reject her as a mad dog despite her best efforts, and though the homeless guy feeds her in exchange for helping him panhandle, she ultimately finds a place with the other people who were cursed to become dogs, and decides life is better as a dog.

Here's how the book fell apart for me. First of all, the explicit first person dog sex scene. She narrowly avoids fucking a real dog, and winds up fucking both of her fellow cursed dog people.

Anyway, the second reason (as if I needed one) the book didn't work for me was that Burgess was trying to write the sort of character who could end the book happy to be a dog, and wound up with a protagonist who honestly sounds suicidally depressed, and I'm very concerned for her. She dreads the future, can't maintain stable relationships, and is constantly self-medicating with a haze of hedonism. Not only are those not doggy character traits, I feel like a happy ending would involve antidepressants, not her stated intent of forgetting her past, living fast, and dying young as a homeless dog. That's just suicide with a little dogfucking along the way. This is basically "and then Gregor Samsa decided being a giant bug was okay, mostly because being human was so monumentally shitty in the first place, and they all lived happily for a short time." You can't really cheer for that, you know? The book was a bizarre mix of existential horror, blithe hedonism, and comedy.

As far as werewolves go, I know she's a dog, but work with me here, the werewolf genre is very small and very bad. I could see this as part of the werewolf tradition of turning people you're mad at into wolves - St. Patrick and/or St. Natalis angrily turned hecklers into wolves in Ossory, it's been done at weddings as a punishment or revenge, and of course there's always Circe.

Alright, looks like this is a good platform to do werewolf book reviews.

I read a lot of werewolf books, and most of them are terrible, but I still love werewolves. I'm not sure what it is about them - I'm trying to narrow down what I do and don't like, to hopefully help me target better stories. Let's reverse engineer the stories I do like.

For starters, I don't really like vampires. I don't really like it when werewolves have to play second fiddle to vampires, or when people recommend a "werewolf book" that is just a cameo in book three of a vampire series. Fie on you, deceptive library catalogue that made me read Twilight. That being said, the werewolves in Iron & Velvet by Alexis Hall are pretty great in their limited pagetime.

I don't mind werewolves who are monsters - it can make for a thrilling horror story. Thor by Wayne Smith was pretty great, though of course I consider Thor to kinda be a secondary werewolf protagonist, since he is a dog. The werewolf in Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites by Evan Dorkin is the same sort of monstrous werewolf as a foil to a dog protagonist. Wolf Hunt by Jeff Strand was also a great read, with bumbling mobster protagonists versus the evil werewolf they kidnapped. Gabriel-Ernest by Saki (which I just read - thanks, chickadee_sun!) is a fascinating short story about an encounter with an affable, opportunistic young werewolf with an interest in human flesh. So I guess the rule here is that if the werewolf is the bad guy, there needs to be an emotional draw - the tragedy of losing a beloved person to lycanthropy, or the fear of it eating characters who care about each other. I do like old wolf strap stories with their hilarious sheep-stealing antics, but I don't like pointless, gory slasher stories about the Beast of Gevaudan, and I don't watch most werewolf movies due to the buckets of blood.

I do like tragic or accidentally transformed werewolves. Weiland in The Changeling Prince by Vivian Vande Velde is a top notch woobie werewolf. Frank in Surviving Frank by David Page is accidentally stuck between forms, and just keeps grimly doing his job as a cop despite being a giant furry monster. Talbot Uskevren in Black Wolf by Dave Gross is a theater nerd who does his best to keep his friends and family safe despite being infected with lycanthropy. Bisclavret in The Lai of Bisclavret is such a good werewolf who tries very hard.

I also like adorable werewolves, especially ones with packs. That werewolf puppy in The Cage by A.M. Dellamonica is amazing, as is the community of lesbians who rallied around it. The werewolves in Lia Silver's Werewolf Marines series are family-oriented and friendly, and I love them. Weregirl by C.D. Bell also has some great werewolves who like cross country running, and are dedicated to protecting an actual wolf pack. Kel McDonald always has good werewolves, from the family in Sorcery 101 to the one that ends up in the pound in The Better To Find You With (I love a good werewolf-in-the-pound story). Cliff from Wilde Life by Pascalle Lepas is a great grumpy teenager. The Alphas in The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher were great, up until they weren't. Though I do like packs, I generally prefer found family dynamics, not werewolves as closed ethnic groups and lineages - I don't really like fantasy-racism stories or the weird emphasis on breeding and bloodlines and babies that happens sometimes. On the whole, I prefer people who can turn into wolves, not entire species of animal-people.

I definitely don't like shifter stories. I have nothing against furries, but I don't really think we're looking for the same things in a werewolf story, and one of the signs that it's not the right kind of story for me is if the werewolves aren't called werewolves, and are just one of a variety of animal people like wolf shifters, bear shifters, etc. and each species has defined character traits. The half-wolf anthro form also isn't really my thing - I prefer werewolves who look like actual wolves. I'm not a stickler about dogs, though - I will happily include dog protagonists, or people turned into dogs.

I don't like dogfucking. I don't really care for things like knotting, marking, or heat, and I strongly prefer if all sex scenes are between two people who are currently human, and nobody mentions being attracted to dogs/wolves, or considers wolfish traits in a human to be sexy, or has sexual thoughts while turned into a wolf. If that's what floats your boat, enjoy, just give me a warning before recommending a story with it.

Other dealbreakers include designated mates, and alpha, beta, and omega roles in werewolf society. I can accept a pack leader, but a highly authoritarian society, or constant jockeying for status is likely to put me off. I'm especially uninterested in "wolf instincts" that boil down to "acting like an abusive boyfriend" or "being extra homophobic," and have unfortunately encountered a lot of it in werewolf books. Let's just name names already - please don't recommend me any of the Mercy Thompson books by Patricia Briggs, or the Kitty Norville series by Carrie Vaughn, and while we're at it, please don't recommend Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver or Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate either. Been there, done that, had a lot to say about it.

There are a lot of old werewolf stories in which the werewolf gets busted by someone spotting evidence of their wolf activities on their human bodies. Often it's an injury that someone inflicted on the wolf that lingers in human form - an arrow wound, a knife slash, a paw getting cut off and turning into a human hand. Sometimes it's blood in their mouth, a scrap of fabric between human teeth, or someone looking suspiciously well fed during hard times. It adds an exciting air of murder mystery to what are, essentially, horror stories.

It makes me a little sad that modern werewolf stories have completely dropped the ball in favor of easy regeneration. I blame vampires, honestly. You wind up with this superpowered arms race in urban fantasy, where werewolves have to be powered up so they don't get bowled over by super fast, super strong, bulletproof, hypnotic, intangible, etc vampires. And then, of course, they have to have the long lifespan to match the vampires too, and some mind control, and sometimes the individual extra superpowers - it really gets out of hand.

I'd like to see some more stories where there are actual consequences to wolfy shenanigans besides just dodgy full moon alibis - a cut on the palm from four-wheeling it, a scratch on the nose from sticking it where it doesn't belong, a microchip from a well-meaning biologist. A proper full moon hangover, you know?

Welcome, everybody! I have no idea how to use this platform. Are there tags? Communities?
(Where do I find people talking about books, werewolves, and sewing?)

On the topic of werewolves and sewing - I'm hemming my new fabric so it can survive the wash (a simple zigzag along the edge is enough), and will work on paper pieced wolf designs some other time, because we are being upgraded to hurricane windows, and the vacuums and power drills and hammers are singing their awful song. I will escape to the library shortly, where I will probably fall prey to the allure of their dime cart again. (Three for ten cents! And they have a new cart of holiday books! I'm so weak!)

A hopefully complete list of books I have bought from the dime cart and not read yet:

Nonfiction:
The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery by Wendy Moore
The Illustrated History of Surgery by Knut Hager
The Right To Look Human: An Autobiography by Jack Penn
After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World by A.N. Wilson
Pickpockets, Beggars and Ratcatchers: Life in the Victorian Underworld by Kellow Chesney
Jonson and Elizabethan Comedy by L.A. Beaurline
A Coffin for King Charles by C.V. Wedgwood
The Crime of Galileo by Giorgio de Santillana
John Paul Jones by Samuel Eliot Morison
Disraeli by Andre Maurois
Caesar Against the Celts by Ramon L. Jimenez
Sir Moses Montefiore: Champion in a Stagecoach by Sylvia Barras
The Closets Are Empty... The Dining Room's Full: An Autobiographical Legacy by Ace Lundon
Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon by Robert Knudsen
Enthusiasm Makes The Difference by Norman Vincent Peale
The 26 Letters by Oscar Ogg
Sewing 911: Practical and Creative Rescues for Sewing Emergencies by Barbara Deckert
Horseback Riding for Boys and Girls by Beverly and Margaret Mohan
The Real World of Sherlock Holmes: The True Crimes Investigated by Arthur Conan Doyle
Upstairs Girls: Prostitution in the American West by Michael Rutter
Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.

Mixed nonfiction and fiction:
A book containing Moby Dick, Life of Samuel Johnson, The Social Contract, The Odyssey, and The Man Who Would Be King.

Fiction:
Historical Whodunits edited by Mike Ashley
Lady's Maid by Margaret Forster
The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper
Rhapsody by Elizabeth Hayden
Castle Hangnail by Ursula Vernon
The Black Stallion by Walter Farley
The Resurrected Holmes edited by Marvin Kaye
The Borrowers by Mary Norton
Murder in the Place of Anubis by Lynda S. Robinson
Silverthorn by Raymond E. Feist
The Emperor's Snuffbox by John Dickson Carr
Fancies and Goodnights by John Collier
The Queen's Fool by Philippa Gregory
The Queen's Man by Sharon Kay Penman
In The Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant
Buffalo Girls by Larry McMurtry

In retrospect, 38 books is a bit much. But how could I resist these titles? I have been slowly working my way through the pile. Anything memorable goes on my Goodreads, and anything lackluster gets stealthily slipped back on the dime cart.

Does anybody have any votes for what I should try to read next?