( More plot bunnies. )

One thing I've noticed in my research is the poverty of the werewolf myth. Guy gets furry. Guy eats people. Guy dies. It makes for a great monster, but a not-so-great protagonist. Some people fill it out by giving the werewolf control over the transformation, but then you've only got a gray, furry Hulk. Other people create entire werewolf societies with more or less reference to real wolves, but there's always a dreary scene where everyone gathers to Recite the Law, then someone challenges someone else according to the Law and there's a fight, and there might be some bitching about sillier aspects of the Law, and that's the cue for someone else to drag out the line, "It is our tradition!" and that's the rebellious hero/ine's cue to Fight Tradition, and in the end the hero/ine is victorious because Tradition is always wrong and old-fashioned and smelly and can never pick up girls in bars, no matter how hard it tries.

Somewhere in there is sex.

There will be someone in leather on the cover. Because werewolves all wear leather.

In short: Is there a book about werewolves that doesn't fall into the same grim hot-yet-militaristic white-boy tribal pattern? I'd be glad to read whatever exists.

Also, what's a good source of information about folkloric werewolves? I know a few things:

Werewolves are not always enemies of vampires. Sometimes vampires have their own packs of werewolves.

Witches sometimes become vampires after death. There's at least one tradition in which the condition is inherited, and witches and vampires are both called vampires.

Is there any traditional relationship between witches and vampires? If witches can head werewolf packs, I have a hell of an idea.


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