When Sherrilyn Kenyon says in a sweet, matter-of-fact Georgia drawl, “I was raised by wolves,” it’s hard not to take her at least a little seriously. Especially if you’ve just finished reading “Bad Moon Rising” (St. Martin’s Press), the latest book in her Dark-Hunter series, in which a pack of wolf/human hybrids sporting an array of supernatural powers plays a starring role.

They take the stage alongside families of bears and jackals afflicted with the same ancient curse — traced all the way back to the Greek god Apollo and made more interesting by a distraught father’s attempted remedy of DNA splicing — as well as a full roster of demons and, occasionally, a plain old human. The whole crew gets along about as well as you’d expect, which is to say that they usually manage not to eat each other. And as if that cast of characters wouldn’t complicate things enough, the fun-loving Fates get to decide the creatures’ lifelong mates at whim. So maybe it’s not wholly surprising when a wolf and a bear fall hopelessly in love (for fans in the know, it’s the story of how Fang and Aimee get together), haplessly dragging each other and their families through hell and back (literally) as they first fight and then doggedly pursue their seemingly-doomed union, but it sure is a good time.

Those aren’t the wolves to whom Kenyon is referring, however. She means her eight brothers and drill-sergeant dad, all of them credited with fostering the blisteringly acerbic sarcasm that runs through her dialogue and narrative. Is this a sample of what it’s like to hang out with her? “Probably,” she said. “Actually, I’m a little snarkier. You can imagine we can be pretty brutal with each other, and sometimes when I’m in other company, I have to remember that not everybody thinks that’s funny.”

It seems pretty clear that plenty of us do, judging from the trips up the New York Times bestseller list that her prolific portfolio has made: a quick search on that Web site yielded over a hundred results, many them with a “1” next to it, along with a column-leading quote by political pundit Maureen Dowd. Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter manga adaptation, illustrated by Claudia Campos, landed on the graphic books chart in July; it was the only one written by a woman or an American. And she’s taking a new direction in “The Chronicles of Nick,” following a young dark-hunter as she tones down the vicious battles and steamy scenes in order to write for the young adult crowd.

The Dark-Hunter series is home to just one of the universes Kenyon spins tales in, but she’s been hanging around it for a long time. Twenty years, is it? “I’m not that old,” she said deftly, “but if I were, yes. Obviously, I started writing before I was born.” Another statement that one wouldn’t think twice about unless it came from an author billed as having single-handedly pioneered the genre of paranormal fiction.

Kenyon had been writing vampire and fantasy stories for about a year when her work at a struggling science fiction magazine gave her the space to publish it. She laughed as she recounted their rather dire straits. “We were so small we used to pay our writers with free copies. So we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could get our circulation up to, like, ten? And then maybe pay for our ink?’ I was asked to write an ongoing series, and I wanted to know if I could write about vampires. I was told, ‘If you get us subscriptions, you can write anything you want.’

“I’d done an article on the origins of Halloween, and the oldest sources took me back to ancient Greece. And one of the things I found fascinating was that the legend of Apollo kept coming up. So my brain rattled it around until all of a sudden it was like, ‘Oh, yeah! Vampires and Apollo…that would be a good series! Helloooo, money over here!’ and I wrote the first short story that night in my dorm room.”

It was never a straight shot to superstardom. The director at the University of Georgia’s creative writing program didn’t consider her publishing credits or Georgia College newspaper editing experience to be sufficiently convincing for admission, so Kenyon instead crafted an interdisciplinary degree for herself focusing on medieval history, language and classical studies along with philosophy, psychology and French — all of which shine as brightly through her writing as a delicately layered denouement or perfectly placed comma ever could. She moved from writing articles to books, sold six in quick succession and then…nothing. Four years full of rejections went by, and then the one in 1997 that stopped her cold: “No one at this publishing house will ever be interested in this author. Do not submit her work to us again.” Well. It seemed like a good time to find a day job.

But she didn’t stop writing. “If anything, it toughened me up. It was harsh, and I'm not a weepy person; I’m from the family of ‘suck it up’ — but what it did was it made me more determined. And it changed the way I wrote. Until then, I was very conscious of the rules of the marketplace — and there are some for every genre. But that made me determined that if I was going to fail, I was going to fail on my own terms and was never going to pay attention to another marketplace. I'm actually grateful to those editors, because it set me free.”

“Bad Moon Rising” will be available in stores on Aug. 4, and Sherrilyn Kenyon will be celebrating its launch at Borders Waters Place, 3140 Lohr Road, at 5 p.m. that day. You’re invited to come dressed as your favorite character and compete in a costume contest for, among other prizes, a “Golden Wristband” that lets you skip to the head of the signing line.

Leah DuMouchel is a free-lance writer who covers books for AnnArbor.com.