Guest post written by The Twice-Wanted Witch author Katie Hallahan
Katie Hallahan is a fantasy author who loves tabletop RPGs, vampire TV shows, corgis, dabbling in nail art, and pumpkin spice everything. She has designed award-winning narrative adventure games at Phoenix Online Studios, an indie game studio she co-founded. She lives with her husband and son in Boston, Massachusetts where, shockingly, she actually uses her blinker when making turns. Katie is on Instagram, Bluesky, and Twitter at @katiehal16, on her website at katiehal.com.
Whether it’s monsters, witches, cults, or cannibals, there’s something about reading a book wherein some being—human or otherwise—goes absolutely wild in a viscerally compelling way. It’s a satisfying moment for anyone who’s ever been so angry they wanted to scream, so furious they wanted to break something, so enraged they wanted to burn it all down.
And let’s be honest—2025 has been a year of feeling all of those things. To say the world is currently filled with plenty of things to make us angry and terrified at once is an understatement. Many of us are legitimately afraid for our lives and our rights alike. We’ve been thrust into a constant fight just to feel safe, returning to the fray even for the battles we thought we’d won.
So is it any wonder that we’re drawn to stories where the protagonists get to be feral and do all the things we feel we can’t? Who get to have and wield all the power and face none of the consequences? If they aren’t human, so much the better! Say goodbye to rules, laws, and limits; give us claws, curses, and fangs and let us howl at the moon. If the world would see us as outsiders, claim that we are threats, then why shouldn’t we become just that, fight back with a power others cannot comprehend, and claim victory?
Take the recently released novel The Mean Ones by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne, for example. Told in dual timelines, it follows Sadie, a 29-year-old powerlifter and physical therapy assistant who watched her friends die in a cult sacrifice seventeen years ago. Despite her wish to live a normal life now, visions of what happened and the voices of her dead friends keep pulling her to the dark side. When Sadie reluctantly agrees to go on a couples camping trip with her boyfriend and their friends, the voices get louder, the visions gorier, and Sadie is pushed to a breaking point. One that just might have readers saying “Good for her.”
Going back a few years, there’s Andrew Joseph White’s 2022 novel Hell Followed With Us. This one’s not for the squeamish, as it contains a lot of gore and body horror. But through those motifs, White tells a visceral story about a trans boy named Benji running from the depraved religious cult that raised him and infected him with a gruesome bioweapon that’s steadily and physically turning him into a monster. Benji doesn’t want to be a weapon, but when he finds a group of teens to ally with, he just may decide to be theirs.
On the less gory, more witchy side is Juno Dawson’s Her Majesty’s Royal Coven trilogy, the last volume of which, Human Rites, released earlier this year. The powerful witches at the core of this series wield powerful magic, often more powerful than they themselves realize. When a newly found magic user is suspected of being the prophesied “sullied child” who will end the world, the women of HMRC are deeply tested from within and without. What they’re willing to risk and become to protect what they believe is right will shatter bonds of friendship, love, and family alike. Not everyone gets, or wants, a redemption arc, and the bloody ends some will go to are lines that cannot be uncrossed.
But this call of the wild is more than just an appetite for vicarious destruction. As enjoyable as that can be, there’s a pull to the opposite end: not the embrace of the feral, but the triumph over it. Because we don’t always want to feel and know we can be feral—we want to know we can overcome it. There’s power in that, too, in finding security, community, and the ordered sense of self.
The Transition by Logan-Ashley Kisner features another trans boy forced to cope with an unwelcome transformation when he’s bitten by a werewolf. As the body Hunter has fought for and desperately wanted begins to change, he has to fight not only for his own flesh, but against the torment of his less than accepting peers and the voice of the werewolf promising him bloody vengeance if he surrenders to the change. At the same time, however, Hunter has friends who love and support him who are willing to stand and fight with him against all comers.
The Nebula and Locus award-winning novel Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell examines ferality from both angles as well. Shesheshen is a shapeshifting blob monster who eats people and hates civilization—to be fair, civilization hasn’t been very kind to her. When she meets a surprisingly pleasant human named Homily, she decides Homily would be a perfect host for her eggs, which would devour Homily from the inside out. But as Shesheshen falls for Homily, she faces a struggle of how to both express and reconcile those feelings with her more ostensibly feral nature, especially since Homily may be the exception to the rule of terrible humans.
That’s why we seek these books out of a need for catharsis and wish-fulfillment; which is what reading is, of course, but it’s not always a simpler, cozier escape we seek. We don’t always want to feel clever or loved; sometimes, we want to unleash our claws, our anger, our sense of propriety. We want to be the monster, we want to fight and shred our enemies. We want to know that we could, even if we don’t. That it’s right and just and justified, and that we’re not the only ones who feel that way.
Because when it comes down to it, confronting the feral, whether it’s as a force of good or opposition, is about survival and community. Finding community, defending community, saving community. Even the monsters we love to become or to fight often move in groups—packs of wolves, covens of witches, even vampires are notoriously always looking to create families and turn new companions.
We just want to survive and be with the people we love, people who support us, monstrous or otherwise. By any means necessary.
