The Midnight Hour » Guest Blogger: Author CARRIE VAUGHN

July 13, 2006 at 8:59 pm

The Midnight Hour is pleased to welcome USA Today bestselling author Carrie Vaughn as a guest blogger. Carrie’s newest book, KITTY GOES TO WASHINGTON, debuted at #118 on the USA Today list.

Kitty, the country’s only celebrity werewolf,gets subpoenaed to testify before a Senate hearingon supernaturals. What could possibly go wrong?

What is it About Werewolves?
By Carrie Vaughn

A question I hear a lot is, why aren’t werewolves as popular as vampires?

They have a lot of the same mystique: mysterious creatures of the night saddled with a curse, powerful, simultaneously human and otherworldly. But while lots of writers have tried werewolf novels in the hopes of becoming the Anne Rice of that particular brand of the supernatural, none of them have stuck.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, since I find myself writing a series about a werewolf. Here’s what I came up with: until recently, most werewolf stories (the ones where werewolves are the main characters and not just the monster of the week) have been pretty much the same. It’s the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story: angst-ridden man turns into monster, returns to being human and feels remorse for the evil he’s done, can’t control the change, desperately seeks a cure, fails, and then dies horribly. Compare this to vampires, which have enjoyed something of an evolution since Dracula.

Also, werewolves are usually depicted as being strangely passive–they aren’t in control of their power, they awake from their transformations without remembering what happened, and they’re depicted as victims of forces beyond their understanding. And aren’t we told over and over again that passive characters make for poor fiction? So what is the aspiring werewolf writer to do? My solution: find another story to tell. Jekyll and Hyde’s already been done, better than any of us could do it.

A few days ago I told someone what my novels are about, and he said, “Is there such a thing as a female werewolf? I’ve never heard of such a thing.” I was so surprised, I couldn’t even get my thoughts together enough to answer him coherently. I should have said something along the lines of, “Dude, it’s fiction, I can make up anything I want.” This all just tells me how ripe werewolves are for a renaissance.

This renaissance is happening, I think. With the current popularity of paranormal fiction, a whole slew of werewolves and other lycanthropes have found an audience. And the film world has done a great job telling different kinds of werewolf stories. In “Ginger Snaps,” Ginger’s werewolf transformation parallels the onset of adolescence. And what parent hasn’t thought that their darling child hasn’t somehow suddenly transformed into a monster in the teenage years?

“The Company of Wolves” delves into primordial origins of the myth and acknowledges the attraction of the transformation–that the beast represents an instinct, a knowledge, a way of living that humanity has abandoned.

“Le Pacte de Loup,” while not technically a werewolf story, shares so many traits with the average werewolf story that I’d argue in favor of including it. It takes the human/monster metaphor and turns it on its head: here, the wolves and those close to them show compassion and wisdom, exhibiting the most valued human traits, while the noblemen are the true beasts.

I made Kitty a werewolf because I didn’t have anything new to say about vampires, and I thought there’d be more to write about with werewolves. A lot of other writers have the same idea, I think. With a few exceptions, the werewolf has been so limited in what kind of stories get told about it, that there’s a huge amount of room to grow.

Here’s the angle I’ve taken: werewolves seem more real to me than vampires in a lot of ways, maybe because they have real-world cousins. One of the cool things about wolves is how individual they are: some are more aggressive, some are more playful, some are more talented trackers, some are better at chasing, and some are even wolf diplomats, keeping peace within the pack. I think of my werewolf characters as falling somewhere on a line between “human” and “wolf.” Some are closer to human, and some are closer to wolf, and they can move back and forth on that scale depending on the situation. But the *really* cool thing is, those “human” and “wolf” end points are different for every werewolf. No more simple Jekyll and Hyde dichotomy! No two werewolves are alike, and that makes for fun fiction.

And a little bit about Carrie: I was a high school valedictorian (tied with five others–it was that kind of high school) and received a BA from Occidental College in Los Angeles (I went there the same time as Ben Affleck, but I never met him, much to my anguish.) I lived in York, UK, for my junior year abroad (ask the Freaksoc crowd about the time I was the Goddess of the River Ouse). I’ve worked as a Renaissance Festival counter wench, a theater usher, an editor, a buyer at an independent bookstore, and as the ever-popular ‘administrative assistant.’ I went back to school. (University of Colorado at Boulder this time.) Once, I was the student. Now, I am the Master. (”Only a Master of English, Carrie.”) Doh!

Carrie Vaughn
KITTY GOES TO WASHINGTON, Available now!
KITTY AND THE MIDNIGHT HOUR, still available!

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