Tag Archives: urban fantasy

Halloween Reads: Urban Fantasy Werewolves, Wizards, Witches, Vampires, Zombies, and Monsters

28 Oct

October is my favorite time of the year with its crisp autumn air filled with the scent of mulled cider and smoky fires and the crunch of vibrant red and orange leaves beneath my feet.  As I put away summer pastels in favor of darker jeweled tones, summer reads also often get shelved for some more serious classic works to linger over during my daily commute.  But Halloween is also the perfect time to catch up with the spookier denizens of the Urban Fantasy realm.  Here is a list of series that will put you in the Halloween spirit!  You can borrow the books from BCCLS libraries and some are even available in ebook format from eBCCLS or eLibraryNJ.

Wonderful Wizards: Jim Butcher’s the Dresden Files

welcome-to-the-jungle
Jim Butcher’s the Dresden Files is a great read for fans of Urban Fantasy.  There are currently one short story collection and fourteen novels in the series.  Harry Dresden is a Wizard PI in Chicago assisted by “Bob”, a spirit trapped in a human skull, and a human police detective Karrin Murphy.  The novels also involve other creatures of myth including fairies, ghosts, and vampires.  The series has been adapted to many formats including a television series, graphic novels, and even a role playing game.  One of my favorite ways to enjoy the series is the audiobooks, which are masterfully read by James Marsters.  The books are best read in order so start with the Storm Front (the first book) and make your way to Cold Days (the latest).

Find your Inner Beast with Werewolves: Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Series

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Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville Series centers around a werewolf ironically nicknamed Kitty.  Kitty works as a DJ and her show The Midnight Hour slowly transforms from a late night music show to a talk radio show where she discusses the supernatural.  Witches, gods, vampires, and other werecreatures populate Vaughn’s World.  There are twelve novels and one short story collection in the series.  Each book often feels to me as if Vaughn is asking a what-if question, such as what if there was a supernatural convention, what if the military used supernatural creatures for war, what if there was a reality show with vampires and werecreature participants, and weaves the concept in to her story.  The first few books in the series are mostly self-contained, but later books build on one another as Kitty explores the long game, a plan for world domination by a mysterious master vampire.  My favorite in the series is Kitty’s Big Trouble.

Spellbinding Witches: Juliet Blackwell’s Witchcraft Mystery Series

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Juliet Blackwell’s Witchcraft Mysteries involve Lily Ivory, a witch who owns Aunt Cora’s Closet, a vintage clothing store in San Francisco.  She is able to pick up information about the past from the clothes and other items in her store.  Her sidekick in her adventures is her familiar Oscar who often takes the form of an adorable small pig.  This series is much lighter in tone than many on this list and will appeal to chick lit fans.  Secondhand Spirits is the first in this five book series.  For those who are fans of ghosts, Blackwell is also the author of the Haunted Home Renovations Series.

Bloody Good Reads with Vampires: Cherie Priest’s Cheshire Red Reports

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Cherie Priest is perhaps best known for her Clockwork Century Steampunk series. I am a huge fan, however, of her vampire series Cheshire Red Reports which includes two books, Hellbent and Bloodshot.  Raylene is a vampire from the flapper days of the 1920s who makes her living acquiring unusual and hard to find items in a way that might be slightly aside from the law.  Her sidekicks include Adrian de Jesus, a former Navy Seal Drag Queen; Ian Stott, a blind vampire; and two feisty orphans Pepper and Domino.  While Priest has not ruled out additional books, the publisher has no current plans for more “reports”, which is a shame since it is a great action packed series with a strong heroine.  Priest has a link on her site for fans to submit a request to Random House to publish more “reports”.

Quick Reads with Zombies: Kevin J. Anderson’s Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.

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Kevin J. Anderson has written 50 national bestsellers and has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the SFX Readers’ Choice Award.  At the 2012 San Diego Comic Con he was honored with the Faust Grand Master Award for Lifetime Achievement.  His Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. Series currently includes three books Death Warmed Over, Unnatural Acts, and Hair Raising.  P.I. Dan Chambeaux (aka Shamble) is joined by his ghost girlfriend Sheyenne in New Orleans where the “Big Uneasy” has unleashed all manners of creatures on the world.  This series will be enjoyable for those who like a little zany humor with their mystery and horror.  I would recommend that you read the books in order, unlike me, since otherwise you will encounter spoilers which will ruin some of the twists in the previous books.

Monsters of All Shapes and Sizes: Seanan McGuire’s InCryptid Series

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A cryptid is a creature that is claimed to exist, but who has not officially been discovered, which includes sasquatches, chupacabras, and all manners of legendary monsters.  Seanan McGuire’s InCryptid series currently includes two books Discount Armageddon and Midnight Blue-Light Special, with the next Half-Off Ragnarok scheduled for publication on March 4.   The first two books focus on Verity Price who has descended from a family of cryptozoologists but also moonlights as a ballroom dancer.  Currently she is studying the creatures of New York, but when a member of the monster hunting Covenant of St. George, Dominic De Luca, shows up it complicates both her assignment and her love life.  I like that future books will focus on other members of the Price family so that Verity’s character development is not slowed in order to span a long book run.  You may also enjoy McGuire’s urban fantasy faerie series, October Daye, or her post-apocalyptic zombie thriller Newsflesh series written under the pen name Mira Grant.

For more Halloween Reads stop by the book display at the second floor vestibule or the Fall book display in the back of the first floor fiction area.  Wishing you all a Happy Halloween!

-Written by Aimee Harris, Head of Reference

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Two Ever Afters: Charlaine Harris’s Dead Ever After and Kim Harrison’s Ever After

8 Jun

dead ever afterI began reading the Sookie Stackhouse novels a few years before the HBO series started.  Since I enjoy urban fantasy and had fallen in love with Louisiana on a visit to New Orleans I found a lot to like about the series with its Cajun setting populated with vampires, fairies, and werewolves.  I quickly read through the first few novels and the continued along as the years passed.  I was pleased with the HBO adaptation, True Blood, which blends in many of the details and the mood of the original work with enough changes that it adds some novelty; keeping one particular beloved character alive especially endeared it to me.  Unfortunately over the last few novels I have felt slightly less interested in the story.  The characters have seemed less likeable and as the level of gloom over the storylines increased, my enjoyment decreased.  I wasn’t ready to bail on them yet the way I had with Anne Rice’s Vampire series around the time that Pandora came out, but I was pleased when I learned that Dead Ever After would be the last book in the series.  I had hopes that this novel as a planned conclusion might bring back some of the magic from the earlier books in the series.

The book itself playfully pokes at the readers’ expectations with the cover and end pages decorated with images of Sookie’s romantic interests a werewolf, weretigger, shapeshifter, and a vampire.  This of course leads to the problem that any series with a love triangle or in this case a love hexagon has that it will never satisfy all the readers with its ending.  I didn’t find the end result surprising or unexpected, although I had been rooting for the redemption of her first love, the vampire Bill, who barely was featured in the book.  The book does feature appearances of many of the friends and foe that have surrounded Sookie throughout the series, but I would have liked more satisfying conclusions and growth for many of the characters.  Although in life people often do not get a happy ending, it is a shame in a series populated with fairies that so many characters instead seem to be settling in the end.

For those disappointed in the ending there is always True Blood, which could choose an entirely different love for Sookie in the finale.  Also coming out around Halloween will be After Dead: What Came Next in the World of Sookie Stackhouse, an encyclopedic epilogue where Harris discusses the lives of the Bontemps residents following the last novel, which may deliver some surprises.  I would say for readers who have not yet sampled the series to check out the first few novels, which are a well written pleasure for a nice summer beach read, but if you too begin at some point to feel disenfranchised just borrow After Dead from the library when it comes out and skip ahead to the end.

Kim Harrison’s Ever After & The Hollow Series

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Fans of the Sookie Stackhouse novels should enjoy Kim Harrison’s Hollow series.  The Sookie novels are set in present day America (though it was not meant to take place at a set time until post Katrina when Harris incorporated the hurricane into the work and gave it a more fixed timeline).  The Hollow novels also take place in modern America, but several decades after vampires and other supernatural creatures came out of the coffin to borrow a True Blood phrase.  In their case it was not due to a blood substitute becoming available, but instead due to human society being thrown into turmoil due to a mass pandemic brought on by genetically modified tomato plants, which caused the unaffected witches, vampires, and pixies to step forward to save civilization (throughout the series there are jokes about humans now being terrified of ketchup and pizza sauce).  Rachel Morgan is a young witch who uses her magic in trying to solve and prevent crimes.  Her partners are a pixie and a living vampire.  One of my favorite characters in the novels is Al, a wisecracking demon who becomes a foil for Rachel throughout the series.  The setting in Cincinnati gives the books more of a gritty urban feel.

Ever After is the most recent in Kim Harrison’s Hollow series.  Although the title may lead you to believe that this is the last in the series, there are actually two more books planned for 2014 and 2015 before Harrison gives her characters their final “ever after”.  Although at first the novel started off a bit slowly and could have been edited down about a hundred pages, on the whole it was filled with action, which propelled it on to what could have been a satisfying ending to the series, but left enough room for further character exploration that I’m looking forward to the next two novels.  In this series the dark places that the characters are taken to emotionally works well.  I like that several characters that had been painted as villains early on have gradually been redeemed.  I was reminded of how much the characters have grown and developed when reading recently a graphic novel prequel Blood Work that Harrison wrote about the early partnership between Ivy, a vampire, and Rachel. The novels are best read in order so though Ever After is definitely among my favorites in the series; I would recommend starting at the beginning.  If the early Sookie novels are a great beach read, this series is best read with a flashlight on a stormy summer night when the power has gone out.  So think about stopping in to the library for one on the next rainy day.

– Written by Aimee Harris, Head of Reference

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