Female Werewolves Deserve Better Horror Stories Than ‘Such Sharp Teeth’

It’s hard to find a standalone female werewolf novel. The female werewolf certainly pops up recurrently in the paranormal romance genre, alongside vampires, witches, ghosts, faeries, you name it. Yet, seldom does the she-wolf get her own monstrous spotlight as a protagonist. Rachel Harrison’s Such Sharp Teeth is one of those rare reads that focuses on a woman letting loose under the full moon. Still, in terms of horror, Such Sharp Teeth is scarce, and the female werewolf’s feral potential gets undercut by a conventional romance arc straight out of a Hallmark movie.

The werewolf has traditionally been rendered a masculine monster. After all, the Old English word “wer,” meaning man, is the very root of werewolf. Male lycanthropes are certainly dominant in folklore and cinema, but the female werewolf continues to claw her way into contemporary novels, as more and more women are looking for stories that tap into a rage inherent to navigating the female experience. In many ways, the female werewolf or shapeshifter has become a playful emblem of female liberation featured in both feminist horror and pop anthems like Shakira‘s “She Wolf.” Defined by painful and intoxicating transformation, the female werewolf is an apt vehicle for exploring trauma, alienation, and bodily autonomy. Still, many written attempts to embody the she-wolf end up caging her into purely campy portrayals.

The Origins of the Female Werewolf

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Mythologically, one of the earliest female werewolf stories comes from Ireland. The daughters of Airitech refer to three sisters who could shapeshift into wolves. On Samhain, they would emerge from a cave called Oweynagat (or, Cave of the Cats), known for being a portal to the Otherworld, to ravage livestock in their wolf form. Later in history, the she-wolf lore builds alongside the witch trials in Europe. Hienrich Kramer‘s infamous book, Malleus Maleficarum, which was used to identify and persecute witches, linked lycanthropy to acts of witchcraft. Witches were believed to be able to summon or control wolves or to turn into wolves themselves by using magic.

In folkloric imagination before the early modern period, the werewolf, as a whole, was seen more as a supernatural affliction or curse rather than something outright malevolent or inherently evil. The reality of Europe’s werewolf trials testifies to how the history of the werewolf dovetails with the persecution of women who defied social and religious norms. Hannah Priest‘s scholarly text, She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves, explores this lineage in depth, demonstrating how the female werewolf is a “manifestation of deep-rooted and complex cultural anxieties.” The historical and thematic weight of the she-wolf, thus, ushers in horror stories of the heavier variety, not just creature feature popcorn horror. Cult classic, Ginger Snaps, for instance, notably aligns the heroine’s infection by werewolf bite with the onset of menstruation, utilizing lycanthropy for a deeper story of coming-of-age and fraught female relationships.

‘Such Sharp Teeth’ Can’t Decide if it’s Horror or Romance

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Such Sharp Teeth, on paper, seems geared to continue the legacy of the female werewolf unapologetically. The novel even designates itself explicitly as “a werewolf novel” on the cover. Rachel Harrison’s approach is, at first glance, promising. Her protagonist, Rory, in search of transformation, returns to her hometown, moves in with her pregnant sister, and has a chance encounter with a rogue wolf that upends her reality. Beneath that potential horror book blurb is the true plot arc of the novel: independent and untamed protagonist, Rory, goes back to her hometown, gets wooed by her hunky childhood pal, Ian, and decides to settle down, effectively ditching her big city life and job in the process.

In a book supposedly about women and rage and control, it is very odd that Harrison chose such a neat-and-tidy ending straight out of a predictable rom-com. Rory, a successful career woman with a wild streak, becomes a werewolf, and that somehow leads her straight to suburban domesticity? It’s understandable that horror readers would not just be surprised but largely angry at this outcome. The female werewolf is perhaps the strongest vehicle in horror for challenging entrenched gender norms and stereotypes, and Such Sharp Teeth doesn’t even gesture toward that recalcitrant path. We do learn who the other (female) werewolf is that attacked Rory, but it’s late in the novel, and that plot twist is quickly swept to the side to serve a happily ever after ending between Rory and Ian.

The quasi-comedy of the body horror component in Such Sharp Teeth doesn’t really land because Harrison refuses to commit to a supernatural trope in the same way that Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang does, for instance, via indulgent magical realism. When the werewolf element is reduced to just quirkiness for a female character, it really hampers the bite radius of dark comedy. Such Sharp Teeth relies on flat dialogue to fill chapters and doesn’t seem to take its own horror element to heart. Granted, it’s hard to write werewolf transformations from the first-person, and then write the transformation again, but differently, as the story progresses by the light of the moon. It’s a brutal, visual transformation that tends to succeed the most on screen.

Publishers Keep Diluting the Horror Label

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The biggest issue with Such Sharp Teeth is not the writing or the characters or even the ending, but the fact that it’s simply not the story that the publisher marketed it as. Penguin Random House genre-tagged the book “Gothic & Horror,” not romance, despite the latter driving the majority of the plot development. Marketing a romance story as horror does both genres a disservice and signals a broader issue in publishing where the horror label is unduly stretched to appeal to online literary trends and aesthetics. In recent years, publishers have been quick to position novels within the “weird girl books” niche, which now boasts a Goodreads list of over 1,000 titles, in order to reach more readers. The result is that horror and dark comedy have increasingly begun to fuse into one “unhinged” literature label, especially in books marketed to women.

As more and more literature today is shelved, promoted, and sold by trope or mood, genre categories are becoming a less reliable guide. Horror fans, in particular, are learning not to trust the dust jacket. On the whole, the hunger for unconventional female protagonists is genuine and deserved, but that doesn’t mean that every novel about the monstrous feminine belongs under the horror umbrella. Such Sharp Teeth is the most jarring example, published in the wake of Rachel Yoder‘s canine-savvy hit, Nightbitch, of how porous the horror literature category has become. These contemporary female-led novels flirt with horror aesthetics or borrow horror tropes, but ultimately fall back on familiar romantic or domestic narratives.

On that note, perhaps the books (and book adaptations) that tackle the monstrous feminine the best are those that are unconcerned rather than apprehensive about their own oddity. The female werewolf in literature has yet to be fully let loose so unabashedly, in horror or otherwise, but she surely deserves stories that do not force-fit her into the frame of a conventional heroine.