Our Werebeasts Are Different / Literature

---

• Above Ground features several kinds of werebeasts, including werepenguins, although the predominant one remains werewolves. Whatever their animal type, their bite is not infectious: it's a trait inherited genetically.
• Anita Blake, in addition to werewolves, has wereleopards, werelions, weretigers (including blue, red and black tigers in the recent books), at least three weredogs (their abilities are inherited instead of being due to infection), weresnakes (cobras and anacondas), wereswans (some are cursed, while others inherit their abilities like the weredogs do), wererats, werebears and werehyenas.
• The Aquarathi: The titular aliens natural form is a giant spined seaserpent with clawed fins who can change into both human and humanoid (basically human but with multi-colored skin, Anime Eyes and sometimes fangs and claws depending on the individual) forms. There are also genetically mutated hybrids that, again depending on the individual, can sometimes shift into full Aquarathi form bot others can only make a partial shift.
• The Black Company:
  • Forvalaka are terrifyingly deadly monsters, generally described as "undead were-leopards". Blindingly fast, horribly strong, and capable of healing nearly any wound in seconds, they require high order sorcery to have even a chance to defeat. Some wizards can take their forms to devastating effect, most notably Shapeshifter and his apprentice.
  • Werewolves and werebears are also mentioned.
• Bobby Dollar has Fatback, a pig with a human mind by night and the reverse by day.
• Book of Imaginary Beings: Argentina is home to the lobisones, men who turn into pigs or dogs, and the tigres capiangos, who take the form of jaguars instead.
• Callahan's Crosstime Saloon: The "Lady Sally" stories have a were-beagle.
• Crescent City: Shifting between forms is easy for them, and there are many species of shifters, including wolves, leopards, lions, and even butterflies.
• Dancing Bears, by Fred Saberhagen, features, guess what, ursanthropes.
• Darker Than You Think: The shapeshifters (dubbed Homo lycanthropus by the Foundation) are believed to be the inspiration for myths and legends throughout the world involving humans changing into animals. Though the Latin name suggests werewolves, they appear to be capable of taking the form of any creature they can imagine (even creatures that have been extinct for millions of years). While transformed, they retain their human memories and motivations, though Barbee finds himself compelled to obey April's commands. Like werewolves in other works, they are weak against silver. Unlike most stories, the transformation is not to their physical body, but rather a mental projection of their consciousness (dubbed a "mind-web" by April) which takes the desired shape. For this reason, they can only take their beast form while their human body is unconscious. The Child of Night lacks this limitation and is able to physically transform while fully awake.
• The Dark Tower: Mordred is a werespider.
• According to The Discworld Almanack, some parts of Uberwald are home to vampire wereducks, who on the full moon become even stupider and more aggressive than regular ducks. This may, however, have been completely made up by the Almanack's authors to fill a page.
• James A. Hetley's novels Dragon's Eye and Dragon's Teeth have a family with the hereditary ability to turn into seals.
• In The Dresden Files, while Harry Dresden is researching werewolves — which themselves come in five types, including basic werewolves, people who turn into monstrous wolves through enchanted belts, massive and nearly unkillable loup-garous created through inherited curses, lycanthropes who only undergo a mental change and wolves who turn into humans — Bob also mentions that there have also been such things as werebuffaloes and weregoats.
• Empire of the Vampire: The duskdancers are, by Silversaint accounts, similar to werewolves from common myth - humans cursed via bite to assume a bestial, feral form between dusk and dawn. In reality, they are far more akin to a human tribe than the vampires they are compared to. Refering to themselves as wealdlings, their curse is in fact purely hereditary, and its bearers control whether they wish to shift shape, albeit they can only do so during sunrise or sunset. Repeated shapechanging does, however, take a toll on the wealdling, as their forms gradually begin to merge more and more. Though their bites are not cursed, they certainly are enchanted, being one of the few things which can scar a paleblood and tear even the iron hide of a Voss vampire. Three distinct bloodlines are known to exist, primarily in Ossway - the cat-kin leófuil, the wolf-kin velfuil and bear-kin úrfuil. Little love is lost between them.
• The Extreme Monsters book Battling Bigfoot has a werekitten named Kitty as one of the newest athletes playing for Team Pendant.
• The Fangs of K'aath: Shifters transform into hulking beasts that can only be harmed by silver, fire or magic.
• Fifty Feet of Trouble includes the jaguar people, an obvious Cat People riff. They're extremely attractive, but whenever they get horny, they turn into jaguars and try to kill whatever set them off. Problem is, almost everything gets them horny.
• Golden Dragon Fantasy Gamebooks has a werecat and a weretiger.
• InCryptid: There are many species of therianthropes, including waheela, tanuki, and chupacabra. Werewolves, on the other hand, are caused by a virus, and can infect any mammals, including humans, mammalian cryptids, and even sheep. The lycanthropy-w virus always turns the victim into a lupine form, though there are other viruses that result in different forms.
• Inheritance Cycle series includes several characters who are referred to as werecats, but the novels describe werecats not as shapeshifting humans, but as a separate magical species. This seems to come from the fact that there are also normal cats in the series. The werecats are stated to be specifically a special form of cats. Their king, although unable to speak to normal cats because they are as dumb as any animal, nevertheless has the power to command them. It is said that the normal cats respect and admire the werecats.
• In Robert Swindells's Inside the Worm, several thirteen-year-olds, for the thousandth anniversary of a local saint's taming of the Elsworth Worm, build a giant costume of it - habitation of which drives incites them to violent hooliganism, during which they adopt the senses of and body of an actual dragon.
• In the Blood features werecats.
• Jane Yellowrock features a Skin Walker named Jane who is technically a classic shifter who can assume any form but prefers (or is forced to) take cat form mostly.
• The Jargoon Pard by Andre Norton features Kethan who can become a pard with the aid of a magic belt. He initially thinks the belt is somehow cused. It's not: he's the child of a wererider featured in 'Year of the Unicorn' but was switched at birth and placed under spells so his innate shapeshifting would be repressed; the belt acts as a key to unlock his powers.
• Jennifer Scales has Weredragons as well as werearachnids (some turn into giant spiders, others into giant scorpions).
• Kate Daniels: Shapeshifters are humans or animals infected with the Lycos virus, engaged in a constant struggle to stay sane. If they lose this battle, they become loups, and the only thing anyone can do is euthanize them. A fraction of children are born loup and another fraction go loup at puberty. They can be fully human or fully animal, and those with a high degree of control can take on a monstrous in-between state known as the warrior form, combining the two for maximum lethality. The leader of the Pack is a werecat. He can change into a lion, but not just any lion; he turns into a North American cave lion, an extinct species which is half again as big as a modern lion. Additional werebeasts include werebears, werebuffalos, wererats, werehyenas, werebadgers, weredolphins, pretty much all kinds of mammals. On top of that, the virus goes both ways, giving animals the ability to turn human, though they usually have to be killed. Very rarely, a werebeast and a beastwere can produce offspring, resulting in a beastkin, which can't turn all the way into an animal but has an in-between form that is a seamless blend of human and animal, in contrast to a werebeast's warrior form.
• The Kitty Norville novels have a number of different types of werebeast, including a were-jaguar and a were-seal. The rule is that the were-creature is always a predator, as Kitty explains to a caller on her radio show who suspects he is a were-alpaca.
• The Lost Years of Merlin features deer-people, who, as their names suggest, can transform between humanoid and deer form. The most notable example is Hallia, Merlin's friend and Love Interest. The Great Tree Of Avalon, the Sequel Series, has eaglemen, including one of the main characters, Scree. Like the deer people, they can change form at will, and in this case tend to live in nests, lay eggs, etc.
• "Lusus Naturae", a short story by Margaret Atwood, centers on a young woman whose parents fake her death to hide the fact that she is a werecat.
• The Magic Goes Away: "The Lion in His Attic" features a werewhale, a weresealion, and a discussion of what happens to weres when The Magic Goes Away — "true" werebeasts are animals who take human form and simply revert during the full moon, and as magic vanishes from the world, they lose the ability to take human form. Their Half-Human Hybrid children retain human form but go feral..
• Mercy Thompson features Mercy, who is a "Walker" (were-coyote) who lives near a pack of werewolves and eventually marries the pack alpha and moves in with them.
  • Not exactly a were-coyote, but close enough. Her powers do not come from a form of lycanthropy, but due to the fact that her father is coyote, the trickster spirit of Native American mythology.
• Merry Gentry: In the first novel, A Kiss of Shadows, Merry's lover is a selkie named Roan Finn who has temporarily lost his ability to change shape.
• Mithgar: Werecreatures are collectively called Cursed Ones; the condition is hereditary, and the Cursed One's animal form is based on what creature they "imprint" on — ie, the first animal they make a strong connection with. The actual transformation is voluntary, but the humanoid and animal forms are controlled by separate personalities; the human remembers what the animal form does and can give it a task by focusing strongly on something before changing, but the animal is only vaguely aware of the human identity and there is always the risk that it will forget to ever make the change back (though a Cursed One's friends may arrange to use some signal to trigger the change if necessary, usually by whispering their human name into the animal form's ear). Cursed Ones are immortal and have a strong Healing Factor, but they can be killed with one of three Achilles Heels — silver, fire, or the fangs and claws of another Cursed One in animal shape. Notable Cursed Ones include Dalavar the Wolfmage (werewolf), Urus (werebear), Urus's son Bair (werewolf) and recurring villain Ydral and his son Baron Stoke (who are the only Cursed Ones to have multiple animal forms, possibly a Black Magic technique both used; both can shift to vulg or fell beast).
• Moongobble and Me: Book 5 reveals that Susan — the Old Woman of the Forest of Night — was turned into a were-toad a long time ago, as was a member of the Nork family, cursing them both to transform one night a month until the curse was broken.
• Newshound features numerous other kinds of werecreature in addition to werewolves, including werepanthers, weredingos, and wereseals, with even more kinds implied to exist.
• Night Watch (Series): People who can turn into animals are one breed of Other. Werewolves are always Dark, but the rest can apparently be of any alignment. Specifically, Dark shapeshifters can only take on a single animal form, chosen when they initiate. Meanwhile, Light shapeshifters are actually Magicians who are gifted with shapeshifting magic and can take on numerous forms along the same theme. As Light Others, Tiger Cub can shift into various big cats, while Bear can take on bear forms.
• Oddly Enough: "In the Frog King's Court" sees main character Dennis gain the ability to become a were-frog, unlocking his own frog heritage (his distant ancestor was a frog turned human) with the help of a potion and letting him transform on the nights before and after the full moon.
• In On The Edge, by Ilona Andrews, the heroine's brother is a werecat. He can turn into a lynx at will.
• Operation Chaos has a weretiger. Because Paul Anderson's laws of magic insist that mass remains constant, he is a very large, fat man in human form.
• The Otherworld Series: One of the main characters is a werecat named Delilah D'Artigo.
• Prince of Pirates, a children's novel, features an enchantress named Leonora, who can turn herself into a panther at will.
• The Pride Series: This series of novels by Shelly Laurenston includes various types of "shifters". They are always predatory mammals, including lions, bears, wolves, and even honey badgers. Even in human form, they're unnaturally strong and retain some of the psychological and physical traits of their animal selves. For example, Olivia "Livy" Kowalski (a honey badger shifter) is short, broad-shouldered, has black hair with a broad white streak in it, has teeth that are as tough as concrete, is practically immune to poison, and likes to sleep under the bed (and on at least one occasion in someone's kitchen cabinets), because it reminds her of a burrow.
• In "Queen of the Black Coast", Conan the Barbarian fights werehyenas who are the minions of the story's Big Bad.
• The Reluctant King: Yargali looks mostly human, though she has some odd features. However, she's capable of turning into a huge snake at will, and apparently so are her entire people.
• The River of Dancing Gods series has, in addition to werewolves and other common types of werecreatures, a variation simply called a "were", which transforms into whatever animal is nearest when the full moon takes effect.
• The fantasy novel The Shattered World takes a more true-to-folklore approach: its various werebeasts are humans who acquire their shapechanging powers through a spell, so they can take the shapes of animals. One of the protagonists is a werebear, and must periodically "release" the bear within, fearing it that will force its shape upon him if denied its freedom for too long. Werebeasts in this Verse are vulnerable to normal weapons, suffer Transformation Trauma, and can never be cured if they've been shapechangers for longer than a few weeks.
• The Saga of Hrolf Kraki: Due to the curse placed upon him by Queen Hvit, Bjorn is a bear by day but a man by night.
• In Saurian, by William Schoell, the titular character and main antagonist is one of a race of hybrids, descended from alien shapeshifters that arrived on Earth during the age of the dinosaurs, most of which took the form of dinosaur-like creatures to blend with the local strongest lifeforms; others eventually took on mammalian forms. While the extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs left most of the aliens (both in saurian and mammalian form) unable to transform anymore, some of their offspring born afterward retained their shifting abilities. A handful of the descendants of both groups survive into the modern age, and some of them (mostly on the mammalian side, who were born as humans) can still change from human to saurian (or a hybrid form) as needed.
• The Shifters Series by Rachel Vincent features werecats who change at will and live in lion-like prides.
• Silicon Wolfpack includes multiple types of hereditary werebeasts, including weresnakes.
• The Silkie by A.E. van Vogt features genetically modified people who can transform into aquatic, seal-like creatures or into living spaceships.
• In The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries, there are a wide variety of "weres" able to turn into an assortment of animals. At least once a buffalo and an owl are seen. There are also "shifters", who are true therianthropes and can change into any animal form but have a preferred default form they must change into on the full moon. Sookie's brother Jason is abducted and bitten by a were-panther, so he turns into a sort of panther-man at the full moon.
• A Song of Ice and Fire has skinchangers as humans that don't "turn into" animals per se, but instead are able to put their minds into that of an animal. Unlike in the television adaptation, the term "warg" refers specifically to someone who skinchanges into a wolf, which is the most common target amongst skinchangers due to a combination of practical considerations (as social, intelligent hunters, wolves are relatively close to humans in mentality) and cultural preference (dogs are even easier, but less glamorous). Some skinchangers do, however, prefer different animals for any number of reasons — Varamyr Sixskins has a panther and a bear in addition to three wolves, and, in A Dance with Dragons, Arya possesses an alley cat.
• In Sunshine by Robin McKinley, there are all kinds of were-animals, and wolves are said to be comparatively rare.
• Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind includes a werecat.
• Tigers Curse focuses on two brothers who have been changed into tigers, though they can change back for one hour every twenty-four; this does not have to be all at once, and Transformation Is a Free Action, so they can have conversations with their shared Love Interest by turning human for a few seconds to answer a question and then switching back. Also, when they become human, they're always wearing the clothes that they had when they were cursed.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Hobbit features Beorn, a mysterious "skin-changer" who can shapeshift into a bear at will and uses this ability to kill any threats to his peaceful life, mostly orcs and wargs. According to Gandalf he is more likely a man who can turn to a bear, rather than a bear who can turn into a man.
  • The Silmarillion also mentions werewolves and a bat-like creature called a "vampire". These demonic creatures are a subversion; it's not that they shift between humanoid and animal forms, but rather that they combine both all the time, and they serve Sauron with whom they apparently share the same origin, or at least the first of each species do, as the immortal spirits named Maiar. Sauron and the other Maiar like him can "shapeshift", since they have no true form (however, their physical forms are not like mortal bodies: the elves refer to them as "veils", and although they can interact with the physical world, they can leave them or they can be destroyed). However, some Maiar end up permanently restrained in mortal bodies (referred to by the Elvish word "hröar") after they have children with humanoids or animals.
  • Finrod and Lúthien use magic to shift their own shape as well as those of their companions, sometimes into animals: however, this is a type of illusion spell, rather than true shapeshifting. This spell requires the skin of the individual monster whose form will be taken.
  • The Maeras, a type of great horse with resistance to evil, are said to be descended from one such Maia: Huan probably is a child of such a Maia as well. These half-Maiar in animal shapes can't shift, but they can talk (though how exactly this works isn't specified, and perhaps it is telepathic). Ents are also examples of this, but with trees. Best not to think about that too carefully.
• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: Weres are people who turn into animals, either at will or under the full moon. They can become almost any animal you might care to think of, although they only get one animal each. Werewolves are among the more common kinds, although most have gone over to the Horror tour. Most are hostile, and they tend to prowl along Fantasyland's many wastes and wildernesses.
• Trash of the Count's Family has Beastmen, people who can shift between human and animal forms, of all types. Their transformations aren't determined by moon phases, but they are capable of "berserk transformations" that make them incredibly powerful. Wolves, Whales, and Cats are just three of the many Beastmen seen or mentioned in the series.
• The Turning by Helen Ellis has werecats. It's genetic, starts sometime during puberty, then lasts for two weeks every year for five years before stopping permanently. The 'turning' is brought on by contact with a cat (real or 'turned'). There is a cure, but it only works before the second time you 'turn'.
• Twisted (2010): Rodney a.k.a Railrunner is a were-roller coaster. Specifically, he turns into an anthropomorphic, dragon-like living roller coaster under the full Moon and exhibits the usual lycanthropic like craving human flesh and even howling. Later on, he gets his roller coaster form more under control, but is still subject to rages and is forced to assume coaster form under the full Moon.
• Uncommon Animals features humans that turn into full wolves by the commands of a human with special magic called "the Voice".
• Warwolf: The Centurion Warrior Book 1: The Warriors has mentions of werecats and even a werecobra, in addition to the more typical werewolves. It's hinted there are other types of werebeasts, but thus far only the wolves, cats, and cobra have been shown in this setting.
• Wereworld has all sorts of werecreatures, not limited to mammals.
• Wizard Of The Grove: Wers come in both wolf and mountain lion form. They were created by Wizards. They turn into very large versions of their respective species and their change isn't linked to the moon but to their emotional state. Which makes pregnancy and especially delivery very dangerous for both mother and child. This is fixed by the Wizard Crystal who gives the women control over their change. She however is not able to do the same for the men.
• In Tais Teng's book De Wortels van het Woud (The Roots of the Forest), the brother gains the ability to transform into various animals during battles, usually as a werewolf. He attempts to transform into a Tyrannosaurus rex at one point, but the spell is such that it doesn't work with extinct creatures.
• Xanth: Werebeasts of various kinds exist in Xanth, usually born from a human mother and a non-human father (the other way around results in a straight hybrid), who can go from human to animal or vice-versa at will. Known examples include a were-horse in Night Mare and a were-dragon in The Dastard.
• Year Of The Unicorn by Andre Norton features the wereriders: a group of all-male humans altered by an adept that can become a specific animal more or less at will (wereriders include a bear, boar, eagle, snow leopard, wolf and horse). They can take other, more monstrous forms as well, but these forms seem to be mostly illusion while the animal shape seems to be real.

---