Things That Go Bump in the Night

Vampires and shapeshifters of the more unusual kind. 1. Bunnicula by James Howe depicts a rabbit that sucks the juice out of vegetables. 2. In Kate Steele's upcoming book, What the Cat Dragged In, one of the heroes is an owl shifter. 3. Gabriel, the hero of Megan Sybil Baker's Gabriel's Ghost, shapeshifts into a Kyi-Ragkiril, a winged demon. 4. Jonathan Raven of Lynn Michaels' Nightwing is an archaeologist whose soul or "self" was split into two parts by an evil, immortal Egyptian soul-eater -- one half is a ghost, the other a vampire. 5. In Stephanie Meyer's "Twilight" series, the vampires are perfectly able to go out in sunlight...if they don't mind sparkling as if they'd been doused in glitter. 6. Clive Barker's Cabal introduces us to a zombie werewolf hero. 7. Bearwalker by Steven Lee Climer and Lori A. Soard tells the story of a man who turns into a bear when enraged and is driven to murder. 8. In N.J. Walters' Stefan's Salvation and Eternal Brothers, a group of power-hungry humans form a vampiric cult, believing that power is passed through the ingestion of blood. 9. Kij Johnson's The Fox Woman tells the story of the feud between a Japanese family and a den of werefoxes...and what happens when the shapeshifting heroine falls in love with the human hero. 10. In The Cat's Fancy by Julie Kenner, a normal housecat turns into a woman after falling in love with her owner. 11. The Woman Who Loved Reindeer by Meredith Ann Pierce tells the story of a human woman who falls in love with a reindeer shapeshifter. 12. The vampires in Marly Chance's Been There, Bit That are not affected by sunlight and have a lifespan fairly close to that of humans. 13. In Jaid Black's Trek Mi Q'an series, the planet Khan-Gor is inhabited by barbaric humanoids who can shapeshft into kor-tar, gargoyle-like creatures with wings and spikes on their bodies. The Khan-Gori are so feared by the rest of the galaxy that they have closed off the planet to outsiders.