Believable Monsters: Werewolves

How do you create a believable werewolf without getting that “oh, god, not another werewolf story” reaction?

Start with the assumption that your readers know nothing about werewolves. Look across multiple cultures, thousands of years of changing stories, to get a more complete picture of lycanthropy. Read about the Beast of Gévaudan (France, late 1700s) and the variations on the Golden Bird story. Look for peripheral connections: the concept of berserkers formed around the notion that wearing an animal skin, specifically bear or wolf, would lend warriors great ferocity and strength. Find out what other countries and cultures call werewolves. A few examples: skinwalkers (American Indian), loup-garou (French), vrykolaka (Greek), varulfur (Icelandic), lupo mannero (Italian), vilkatas (Lithuanian), lubins (Normandy), aswang (Phillipines), bodark (Russian), and many more. Look for cross-overs and bizarre combinations: in Portugal, Russia, and Serbia there are, respectively, the bruxsa, the wawkalak, and the wurdalak, all werewolf-vampire combinations.

Legends and stories in your fictional world should span multiple cultures, transforming along the way to show something new and interesting about each region. For example, what kind of culture would come up with a werewolf who prefers gemstones over eating humans (in our world, the Spanish lob hombre)? What does it say about a culture if the local were-creatures are dolphins (boto, Brazil) or small, non-aggressive birds (uirapuru, also Brazil)? There’s even a type of shapeshifter that prefers the taste of beer to that of human flesh (the varulv of Scandinavia)–now if that’s not a prompt for an interesting story, I don’t know what is!

So what are you waiting for? Start researching already!

Here are a few good resources:

The Mythical Realm http://www.mythicalrealm.com/legends/werewolf.html

How Stuff Works http://science.howstuffworks.com/werewolf5.htm

Grimm Stories http://www.grimmstories.com

Werewolves http://www.werewolves.com/

And of course, you can’t go wrong – much – with Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org

Until next time–keep writing, and keep researching!