Thanks Fur Last Night

These contemporary novellas about shape-shifters are marketed as erotic romance, but caveat emptor. An opening declaration of “Kill. Kill. And, yes, kill,” uttered by an ursine stalker preparing to shoot a family in their own backyard, makes it clear that more than lust is being triggered here. Langlais’s “Bearing His Sins” casts the stalker as a romantic hero despite his death threats, fondness for nonconsensual sexual contact, and nonexistent emotion. It’s a thriller told in the dialect of alpha male pornography: “I’ve got something just the right size to stick in there.” The casual objectification and misogyny sit oddly next to Taiden’s sweet “Bought by the Bear,” which features a relationship of convenience that turns into true love when a shifter hires a human woman (who’s a survivor of domestic abuse) to pose as his mate for a family occasion. Baxter’s “The Alpha and I” offers the subgenre’s staple plot: a human woman living on the fringes of civilization encounters an unconscious stranger and takes him in, gradually discovering his shifting abilities and embracing his difference as he fights to keep them both safe from the evils of his world. Aside from shifter-as-hero, there is no common theme drawing the stories together, and no exceptional quality either. (Jan.)