Fiction Reviews
I Kissed A Werewolf and I Liked It
(2025) Cat Hepburn, Wildfire, £10.99, pbk, 309pp, ISBN 978-1-035-41988-3
Fun title, inspired by chorus lines in Kate Perry’s 2008 pop song, 'I Kissed A Girl'.
Bookworm, Brodie is studying literature at University, fully embracing student life. A lot of the book’s breezy humour comes from interaction with her party-hard student and accommodation friends.
Brodie also has sadness in her life, as her sister Grace, was killed in an apparent accident during a childhood climbing dare, falling from the bedroom window at the family home, an incident that Brodie is haunted by.
On a University library visit, Brodie finds herself stalked and attacked by a mysterious figure who bites her in the course of the assault. It’s no surprise given the book title that this is a werewolf and Brodie finds her personality changing dramatically in the days to follow. Her sex drive intensifies, she parties hard to the point of neglecting her studies and eats raw meats she grabs and devours on the spot in a supermarket, getting herself caught but narrowly and unconvincingly escaping shoplifting charges.
Brodie finds that she was set up by a friend, who is already a werewolf and takes Brodie to a nightclub that serves as a secret Werewolf base, run by the alpha female, Nova, who Brodie gets infatuated with despite her rejection of Brodie. This proves to be due to Brodie having some kind of block in her head that prevents her from giving in to her full lycanthropic inner self and metamorphising into a werewolf. Brodie is seen as an outsider by the wolf colony and increasingly estranged from human social circles too.
The story now shuttlecocks between the conflicting realms, as Brodie is largely free to come and go as she wishes, and keeps trying to find fresh ways to gain acceptance in the werewolf clan. Seeing that they have gladiatorial battles with one another she rashly signs up to fight in the no rules arena herself, gaining only pain and humiliation in the process.
As the story progresses, Brodie finds that her rejection is not so much down to her failure to fit in as from a need to protect her as a rather contrived ‘chosen one’ prophesy makes her special, and risks drawing the wolf circle she is on the fringes of into a deadly war with a rival clan.
In holding Brodie back from her destiny and full potential, the book also holds back the elements that could make the work more interesting. The reader is teased with what is obviously going to be the big finale, which certainly happens only to be rushed through in the last few chapters. We learn very little about the rival wolf-clan.
Tonal shifts from Inbetweeners student comedy to horror and later to chosen one heroics feel like three separate stories and genres that never fully knit together. Everything cancels everything else out. This works best as a comedic look at student campus life. The very fantasy /horror elements the work sells on are distracting and less impressive or convincing. The book really fails to make anything of its LGBT elements too, (a strong factor in the Kate Perry song), as that is pushed into background incidental detail.
Chapters are started with exam and essay questions for English literature papers though most have no relevance to the events unfolding within the given chapter.
Arthur Chappell
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