The newspaper reporter/protagonist of P.D. Cacek's CANYONS labors in the sweaty vineyards of a newspaper rather farther down the journalistic food chain than does the heroine of TRIBULATIONS. C.K. "Cat" Moselle is a newly minted journalist, just seeing her first real story come out in Quest News Journal (The Fastest Growing Promulgate Journal in America), whatever that means. Cat isn't sure without checking her dictionary. What she does know is that Quest is most frequently sold in sordid company at supermarket checkout lines. Her debut story is "I Was Big-Foot's Love Slave." Get the picture?

Working as she does for the most sensational of tabloids, it still takes her a little time to comprehend the hideous irony when, on a city bus, she's rescued from a crazed crackhead by an attractive gentleman who abruptly sprouts claws, fangs, and fur, then rips her assailant to shreds. She does realize this goes a bit beyond the normal call of chivalry, but her prospective story of a lifetime disappears before she can even suggest an interview.

Cat's not ready to despair, though. Through hard work and some goofy circumstance, she finds herself uncovering the existence of an elaborate lycanthropic culture lurking beneath the surface of contemporary Denver's urban mask.

Like any good heroine worth her salt--or wolfbane--she's got a feeling she could get into big trouble with her rescuer once she finds him. The werewolf in question (he jokingly informs her that lycanthropes prefer to be called "Metamorphosic Americans") is Lucius, and he's definitely an alpha male. As a matter of fact he's indeed the leader of his pack.

Things get considerably more complicated when Cat discovers that the city is something of a continuing battleground in which dominance is being fought over by bitterly opposed subcultures of werewolves and weremen.

Poor Cat finds she's more of an innocent in all this than she had ever suspected. Writer Cacek keeps her hapless heroine oscillating uncomfortably between comic and more serious poles. The novel intersperses the smart-ass funny bits with extremely graphic interludes of ultraviolent nonhuman behavior.

The reader catches on to this world-view disparity long before Cat does. She spends far too long interpreting the world in terms of the headlines that might appear in Quest were she to interpret each new horror as a feature story. And when she's finally irrevocably immersed in shapeshifter culture, she discovers that "bitch slap" isn't just a colorful idiom.

What author Cacek eventually concocts is an uneasy mixture of the amusing and the horrid. One might be tempted to suggest tweaking the proportions, but one cannot argue that beneath the occasionally hokey fake fur, there's some real sinew and blood. If you start out CANYONS thinking this will end up as a predictable lightweight werewolf romance for human readers, you'll be wrong.

This is much more a hardnosed romance for lycanthropes.

-- Ed Bryant (Originally appeared in LOCUS, December 2000).