Wolf Girls: Dark Tales of Teeth, Claws, and Lycogyny Review
Female werewolves does not mean soft and pretty. These 17 short tales of wolf girls will keep you up at night…
If I saw Wolf Girls: Dark Tales of Teeth, Claws, and Lycogyny on the shelf of a bookstore, I would buy a copy without hesitation and then spend the next three weeks trying to find a space to squeeze it onto my overflowing Werewolf book case. Luckily, Wolf Girls is an e-book available through Amazon and Hic Dragones Press.
Because it’s an anthology, Wolf Girls is a little bit difficult to classify as a whole. If you’ve ever gotten a box of mixed chocolates and lost the insert that tells you what flavour you’re about to try, you’ll understand why describing Wolf Girls is a bit of a challenge.
Wolf Girls is not one thing. It is seventeen very different short stories written by very different people from a variety of countries. Your personal taste is going to dictate what you like and don’t like when you page through this book.
As a positive of this format, every story is unique. While Wolf Girls shares the common themes of teeth, claws, and lycogyny, there are no repeats in style or voice throughout the anthology. Each story gives the reader the chance to experience a different take on the werewolf lore. Within these pages are werewolves that change on the full moon, werewolves that inherit shapeshifting through genetics, and werewolves that exist like a computer virus, to name a few.
Female werewolves does not mean soft and pretty. These stories are gritty and bone-cracking. A few made me cringe, which delighted me and made me want to lick blood off my teeth.
I was surprised by the content of my favourite stories of the bunch. A woman who stops shaving until she turns into a dog and a messy flat tenant who appears out of the woods are not the kind of werewolf stories I usually pull for, but the writing was engaging and enjoyable. Some of the stories in the anthology were so unexpected that I found myself thinking about them hours later; these stories kept my interest piqued even through the few stories I did not fully enjoy.
If you’re tired of the female werewolves that populate the paranormal romance/detective thrillers with their tragic backstories and pining for alpha male domination, Wolf Girls will be a refreshing change of pace to your werewolf collection.
If werewolves call to you the way they do to me, you may also want to read Mookychick’s interview with Dr. Hannah Priest on her research into female werewolves in pop culture. It makes for fine background reading to support the stories in your copy of Wolf Girls…