One of my favorite things about writing science fiction and fantasy—in all its shapes and forms—is how communal it can be. Writers share worlds, co-create worlds and characters, play in each other’s sandboxes. From Wild Cards to Andre Norton’s many collaborations (including one with Robert Bloch), from the Darkover anthologies to the Valdemar story collections, not to mention all the movie novelizations and media tie-ins, SF and F has a long and storied tradition of mixing it up and sharing it around.
Shifter romance is no exception. There are plenty of solo acts, and duos like Ilona Andrews (who shades over toward urban fantasy). And then there’s Zoe Chant. Zoe Chant takes collaboration to a whole new level. It’s a shared pseudonym, a collective of writers. These are pros with successful solo careers, getting together to write in an ever-expanding shared world of shifters, magical creatures, danger, daring, and heart-stopping adventure. And romance. In every volume, two people get together, and there’s that essential Happy Ever After.
Elva Birch is one of the group. I thought I recognized her touch in Defender Cave Bear, with the brief visit from the dragon shifter, and the idea that every shifter has a destined mate whom the animal half recognizes on sight. But there are other writers’ imaginations at play here.
And play it is. This is sheer and unbashed fun. I can imagine the collective Zoe chortling in glee as they start with a cave bear shifter, throw in winged kittens and a size-shifting pegasus, double down with a raptor shifter (as in veloci-), and hit it with a gargoyle and a rampant pteranodon. Because they’re pros, and because they know what they’re doing, it works.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t serious themes. Hero Pete is an ex-Marine with PTSD. Heroine Tirzah is disabled and uses a wheelchair. Pete is a single father with a teen daughter. The family drama rings true to life—even when it’s soaring off into pure delightful wish-fulfillment fantasy.
I want that Pegasus so bad. He’s tiny by day. He can stand in your palm, and hide in your jewelry box. But when the moon is up, he’s large-pony-sized, and a person can ride him. Through the air. Under the moon. Just so long as they make sure to land before the moon goes down.
The energy here, and the often explicit inspiration, is the universe of comic books. Shifters in this book are the product of lab experiments on soldiers (hello, Captain America) by a gang of wizard-scientists (oh, hi there, Dr. Strange), and the magical winged creatures are another and related project.
I confess I’m not a huge fan of comic books, or graphic novels if you prefer. I like to run my own pictures in my head. Just give me the words, I’ll fill in the visuals. But here, I caught myself wanting the graphic-novel version. The first battle with the gargoyle just begs for it. I can see it, inked panels and lettered dialogue and all.
The star of the episode, the cave bear shifter, sees his condition as a curse, and at first it truly is. Touching anyone causes him intense pain, which severely complicates his relationship with his daughter, already fraught by his frequent absences on missions. On top of that, he’s horrified by his lifelong tendency toward blind rages, which now manifests when he’s in cave-bear form.
Rage triggers the transformation. Once he’s transformed, he loses his human consciousness. When he changes back, he doesn’t remember what happened.
Thanks to true love and a kickass destined mate, Pete learns to accept his bear self. Better yet, he learns to control it. Then he can control the shift, and start to integrate the halves of himself.
In the process, he learns the real extent of his powers. He’s more than a man who can turn into a giant bear. He’s also what Tirzah calls the Shoulder of Strength: a protector and healer, a strong support for his friends and colleagues and, most of all, for the people he loves.
The beauty of a well-done romance is that you know what you’re getting. True love, though the way to it is never smooth and there are obstacles to overcome. Those obstacles, here, range from the shifter’s curse to the heroine’s disability (about which she has no self-pity at all) to the bad guys who are out to capture Pete and turn him into a mind-controlled Dark Knight.
Pete has a bad habit of not telling anyone what’s going on with him, and part of his evolution of a character involves learning to open up. But because this is a romance, you know he will figure it out, and in the end, he’ll get his destined mate and sort out his family, too. And of course they’ll defeat the bad guys. Because how can they not?
Judith Tarr is a lifelong horse person. She supports her habit by writing works of fantasy and science fiction as well as historical novels, many of which have been published as ebooks. She’s written a primer for writers who want to write about horses: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. She lives near Tucson, Arizona with a herd of Lipizzans, a clowder of cats, and a blue-eyed dog.
