Paranormal Romance Blog

In Lord of Legends (HQN Books, April 2009), author Susan Krinard combines shapeshifting, classic mythology and historical romance into a tale of love and magic. Read on as Susan tells us more about the legends behind her new novel and her own history with writing paranormal romance…

by Susan Krinard, author of Lord of Legends, Lord of the Beasts, Come the Night, and Dark of the Moon

I’ve been a fan of shapeshifter stories for as long as I can remember. When I was much younger, I was fascinated by the Cheysuli novels of Jennifer Roberson and other fantasy stories about men and women who could change shape into wolves, cats, seals and horses. I was drawn to the notion of attaining the strength, grace and instincts of such animals, the secrets to be revealed in the act of leaving humanity behind. The intrinsic danger in a shapeshifter protagonist, torn between two lives and two worlds, between instinct and intellect, always seemed the perfect basis for a dramatic story.

When I began writing,  shapeshifters simply didn’t appear in romance novels. During the first flush of  paranormal romances in the early 90’s, there might have been a handful of such characters, and when they did appear, they were generally cursed and tragic figures.

In 1993, I began to write my first romance novel, which later became Prince of Wolves. At the time I’d read little romance, and didn’t really know what was or was not commercial, so I set out to write what interested me: shapeshifters, werewolves in particular. Because of my background as a SF/Fantasy reader, I wasn’t interested in curses. I wanted my werewolf protagonist to be in charge of his shapechanging and to revel in his dual nature. No silver bullets, no painful transformation with the rise of the full moon.

I think I might have been the first romance writer to present such a hero; when paranormal went out of fashion again, I was still one of the few writing shapeshifter characters. It wasn’t until the most recent blossoming of paranormal romance that others authors began to explore the theme, to the point that non-cursed werewolves are now very common romance heroes and heroines.

Constantly looking for new ways to approach the ideas that interest me, I considered what I might do next. There are only so many plausible animal subjects: many authors had tried various types of cats, and some had done selkies (seals). I wasn’t sure about  horses (at least in romance; there have been several good ones written by SF/fantasy writers, such as The Grey Horse by R.A. MacAvoy.)  But the idea of shapeshifting equines gave me another idea: what about unicorns?

This wasn’t as much of a stretch as it sounds. I’d decided a few years ago that I’d like to explore some of the “faerie” myths of the British Isles. After a bit of research, I developed the “Fane” … the Fair Folk of Celtic legend, also known as the Sidhe (pronounced “shee”.)  Though most faerie lore shrinks the Fair Folk to a diminutive size, I decided to go back to the old Irish legends that paint the Sidhe as resembling humans in stature. I placed my Fane in the Land of the Young, Tir-na-Nog, a plane where life is eternal and beauty commonplace.

Like most Faerie folk, the Fane are not always kind to mortals. In fact, my Fane tend toward selfishness, arrogance, and disdain for humankind. There are exceptions, of course: my hero Hern in The Forest Lord, for one. And their half-human children, like Donal in Lord of the Beasts, are often torn between the magical Fane world and troubled earth, between immortality and love.

What better home for unicorns, I reasoned, than Tir-na-nog? What if their king was exiled from the eternal realm and forced to take human shape in a world that had once exterminated his kind?

In Lord of Legends, Arion, the unicorn king, begins by despising the human domain to which he’s been condemned, a helpless prisoner of the mortal lord who longs to hunt him as the rarest of game.  But his arrogant heart is slowly awakened by the woman who saves him, Mariah Marron, the  new but untouched bride of the Earl of Donnington. He’ll have to decide if he can sacrifice his true nature-even his very life-for the sake of the woman he’s coming to love, or abandon her to her own imprisonment. And Mariah will have to make the same choice between captivity, her hidden Fane nature, and her love for the man she calls Ash.

Writing about unicorns is always fun. So is writing about werewolves, and I expect I’ll keep doing it as long as they’ll let me.

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Lord of Legends in stores now in print format. Use the Book Browse feature below to read the first chapter!

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You can also check out this special Enriched Edition eBook which contains bonus appendices by Susan Krinard on the mythology behind Lord of Legends and hyperlinks in the text (if you’re reading on a web-enabled device like a computer) to more information about historical and mythological terms.