Ever since I got into the whole werewolf genre, I’ve wanted to see a werefox. People do all the other big predators–weretigers, werepanthers, werebears, weredragons. I’m pretty sure there’s even wererats out there. But foxes just aren’t as widespread.
Upon hunting around on Amazon, I turned up a few werefox books. This one, Bronze Fox, is about a guy who turns into a fox in a kind of steampunk setting. It was interesting. From what I gather, anyone who turns into a fox will have vulpine characteristics–cunning, crafty, quick, all that stuff we associate with foxes.
Wolves, on the other hand, are the ever-popular pack hunters of the night. More dangerous, I suppose. You never hear about people being killed by a pack of foxes. The worst thing they do is kill chickens or cats.
But maybe a smart hero is intimidating–after all, most werewolf stories these days are romances. “We don’t want our men smarter than us!” the ladies shriek. “We want him with rippling abs, not a brain!”
I wanted a werefox story. I hunted Amazon, I hunted Wattpad, and turned up a whole lot of NOPE. Oh, there’s werefoxes out there, but it’s just an orange-colored wolf. There’s little exploration of how different foxes are from wolves, or that they’re crafty, and make different sounds, and even snarl differently. (Wolves bare their teeth–foxes open their mouths all the way.)
So I set about writing a paranormal romance that features a werefox. I wanted it to be a wolf guy and a fox girl, so they could deal with their animal differences as well as their human ones.
This brought up another question–do people have to be bitten to become a werefox, the way they do with werewolves? Or do they transform a different way?
This led me on a tangent into alchemy, particularly their bonkers teaching that all matter can turn into all other matter–the “mutability of form” principle. Alchemy isn’t too far off our modern-day chemistry, actually. I had to really dig around to find the crazy stuff. But it added a really fun angle to this particular story.
Because it’s me writing, it turned out as more of a romantic suspense than a straight romance. Come on, there has to be a proper fox hunt at least ONCE, right?
Anyway, Outfoxing the Wolf will launch on all major vendors later this week. Maybe you, too, will enjoy the ins and outs of a werefox vs a werewolf.
K. M. Carroll, Author 