Patricia Briggs:
Moon Called
Blood Bound

Moon Called and Blood Bound are the first two novels in Patricia Briggs’ urban fantasy series featuring Mercedes (Mercy) Thompson, a not-quite-human auto mechanic raised by werewolves. She herself is a shapeshifter, but of a kind known in indigenous North American traditions, not European ones – a skinwalker. Her animal shape is that of a coyote, she doesn’t have the great strength of the werewolf but she is not bound by the moon, is faster than ordinary humans, is resistant to certain kinds of magic and can see and talk to ghosts.

In Mercy Thompson’s world, the supernatural beings – fae, werewolves, vampires and others – are in the process of revealing themselves to ordinary humankind, because it is becoming harder and harder to keep their existence a secret. At the beginning of the series, only the lesser fae have done this, but other kinds of non-humans are dealing with the question of how to respond to the increasing problems they are having in remaining undetected, and what changes may be necessary to old habits and traditions in either keeping hidden for now, or in revealing themselves without sparking fear and potential retaliation from humans.

There’s a lot of neat things to commend the series, but there’s also one huge thing that is potentially poison – Mercy gets very close to both werewolves and vampires, in a way that I find just a little too reminiscent of the early Anita Blake books, although with much less actual sex. However, there is a fair amount of focus on dominance issues, the Alpha wolf of the local community declaring Mercy to be his mate at least in name, and how that affects her relationship with his pack, the politics of the local vampire community (Briggs uses the nomenclature “seethe” for a group of vampires related by loyalty to one master), the relationships between pack and were, her friendship with one of the more powerful local vampires, all of the things that made Hamilton’s books interesting at first and then made them intolerable once she’d gone too far with it all.

So far, Briggs is avoiding the pitfalls, and I’m enjoying the series quite a lot, but I’m reading with caution.

Saint-Germain: Memoirs – Tales of the Vampire Saint Germain by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Saint-Germain: Memoirs is a collection of shorter fiction – two short stories, two novelettes and a novella – presenting incidents in the long life of Yarbro’s immortal hero-vampire. Like her first short story collection of featuring the vampire, The Saint-Germain Chronicles, the stories here cover a wide span of years, from ancient Greece to modern times. In fact, it is only in these two collections – at least so far – that we have any glimpse of how a 4,000 year old vampire copes in the present day, which is one of the things that make these collections particularly enjoyable. At least to me, seeing Saint-Germain in modern times brings the vampire closer to the reader and opens up the sense of wonder, the possibility of great mysteries hiding in the mundane world we all think we know.

My favourite pieces are the two short stories – both deal with encounters between Saint-Germain and women who stand up for themselves. While most of the Saint-Germain narratives involve complex relationships with interesting women, the stories that interest me the most are those in which Saint-Germain becomes involved with women who began from a position of inner strength, regardless of their circumstances and whatever situations bring them into the vampire’s path. In the first story of this collection, Saint-Germain’s path briefly crosses that of one of the most well-known “shrews” of ancient history, Xanthippe, wife of Socrates. And in the final tale, Saint-Germain matches wits with an ambitious reporter in modern-day Vancouver.

The remaining three pieces in the collection are interesting as well, giving the reader glimpses into three different times and places – one already familiar from one of the novels – in the unlife of Saint-Germain

All in all, a pleasant visit with my favourite vampire.

Minion, L. A. Banks

I must confess to being deeply disappointed by this book. So much of today's urban fantasy is being written by white women, about white heroines, that I really wanted to enjoy an urban fantasy about a black heroine, by a black writer.

Unfortunately, I found Minion to be overly derivative, unnecessarily complicated, slow-moving and poorly plotted, and, what I actually found most jarring of all, annoyingly inaccurate in its attempts to give the ornate edifice of its mythology an occult underpinning.

See, there are master Vampires who occupy the seventh level of Hell, and lesser vampires who hang around in the lower levels, except when they hang out on earth (at one point, I thought someone was describing a D&D adventure), and there are only so many lines, one for each continent. And then there's the Guardians, who are empowered by all the lovely forces of light, and come in all the rainbow colours of the races and faiths of the earth, and there are always 144,000 of them (a tribute to the original 12 tribes, but whether that's for the 12 Tribes of Israel or for some idea about 12 tribes of humanity I'm not sure) and they protect sacred texts and do good deeds and fight vampires and other nasties and whenever a super-duper vampire slayer is about to be born, they try to find him or her (at least there's some gender parity here) and protect and teach the slayer until he or she is ready to complete the change and kick mega-vampire ass.

But this time, Damali Richards, the slayer, or Neteru, is a super special "millennium bridge" female, who was conceived in one millennium and will come to power in another. To make her even more special, her father was a cleric who hunted vampires until he was seduced and turned by one, and her mother was touched but not turned by the same vamp while pregnant with Damali. And there's some other stuff having to do with mystical triangles in the sky that haven't been seen for 3,000 years and the slayer's mama having been an innocent who unknowingly cast a revenge spell over the buried coffin of a master vampire who then supernaturally mated with the vengeance demon to create a new breed of super special demonised vampires that are now running loose and killing both the guardians surrounding Damali and the family and "business associates" of her childhood boyfriend and gangland leader Carlos, who now owns a major night club and runs drugs and a prostitution ring.

Oh, and Fallon Nuit, the master vampire who killed her daddy, is trying to seduce Damali in her dreams, because a Neteru can somehow, if properly seduced by a vampire at just the right time when she's begun to mature but hasn't come fully into her power, become pregnant with a daywalker, a vampire who is invulnerable to light. Naturally Damali hasn't told any of her teacher/guide/protector/fellow warriors of light about this, in part because her mentor hasn't told her that all the master vampires within psychic range of her would be compelled to do this, even one the time to try and get her pregnant is passed, because a mature Neteru gives off psychic pheromones that make vamps of the opposite sex go crazy trying to turn him/her... and maybe I should just stop now, even though I haven't even got to the point where the rogue master vamp Fallon Nuit owns one of the biggest urban music recording and promoting companies in the world and he's planning simultaneous concerts in five cities that will form a pentagram over the world and... do something creepy, I'm sure.

Now I'll admit that mob and gang-related crime is not something I tend to enjoy reading, and Banks situates the war between the vampires and the Warriors of Light in the interface between producers and creators of urban music and performance art and various gangs based on ethnic membership (black, Latino, Asian and Russian gangs are referenced at various points, and many of them work for Fallon Nuit). Hell, I didn't even enjoy Mario Puzo's The Godfather, one of the classics of the criminal association genre. So I start out struggling with the setting. But I could have dealt with that.

However, Banks has taken bits and pieces from almost every variation on the vampire story that I know of, from European, Chinese and African folk traditions though the early literary imaginings such as Dracula and Lord Ruthven, to modern media treatments from Anne Rice to Buffy, many of them not ordinarily compatible, and shoved them together with some strange mixture of Christian and New Age spiritualism (and some very dicey astrology), and tried to make a coherent mythos. It doesn't work, and it's way too complicated to permit the suspension of disbelief, For me anyway. Come to think of it, it's not all that crazier than the Book of Revelations, and lots of people manage to suspend reason as well as disbelief long enough to swallow that.

The structure reminded me of a bad police procedural, only instead of the cops going back to the same witnesses over and over again each time one of them changes his or her story (Cold Case is one of the worst of the current lot in this regard, I find), the Warriors themselves keep going back to their wisewoman/seer, Marlene, everything something new happens, only to find that she knew about it all along but couldn't tell them because the time was not right, and even though she's telling them something now, there's still shit she's not sharing because the time still isn't right. Like warning Damali to watch out for vampires invading her dreams.

There really wasn't much plot for the first nine-tenths of the book, just exposition of the complicated mythos and setting and the backstories of the characters, much of the former extracted slowly and painfully from the seer Marlene. The characters talk a lot, and have lots of internal monologues, and that actually assists the one good thing I found about the book - one does get a good sense of the characters, their stories, their motivations. And I liked many of those characters, especially Damali. She's a young woman on the verge of a terrifying destiny, unsure and over-confident by turns, eager to do what she's been trained to do but at the same time, rebellious and loning to be like every other young woman who gets to go hang out with her friends at clubs and meet boys.

If someone out there could assure me that Banks manages to tone down the overblown and ritualistic origin stories and slayer mythology and just tell a story, either in the later books of the Vampire huntress series, or in any of her other urban fantasy books, I'd be willing to try her stuff again, just on the basis of the strong characterisation - because all of us need to be reading more books about strong women of colour, and that's one thing that Damali surely is.

But they've got to be better written than this.

Romancing the Dead, Tate Hallaway

Yep, Garnet Lacey is back, with another mystery to solve among the undead of otherwise fantastical denizens of Madison Wisconsin. Sebastian, Garnet's vampire fiancé, is missing, his ghouls (human he has a feeding relationship with) are jealous of her, his renegade half-human son Matyas has reappeared in town, there's something terribly off-centre in the new coven she's trying to form, and there's a very strange shape-shifter on the loose.

The first two books in the Garnet Lacey series, written by Lyda Morehouse under the penname of Tate Hallaway, were pleasant supernatural romance romps with solid metaphysical underpinnings, and the third volume continues in that vein - part of what I like about them is that while both Morehouse/Hallaway as the writer and her protagonist Garnet are serious and respectful toward the occult, Garnet as a character is a woman with a keen sense of the ironic, the comic and the ridiculous as well as the serious. The combination of the two perspectives in one character, and one book, creates as if by alchemy a result that seems both satisfyingly real, and patently fantastic all at once.

As supernatural romance mystery "chick-lit" goes, this is definitely some of my favourite stuff.

New Amsterdam, Elizabeth Bear

Someday, I believe, Elizabeth Bear is going to be universally recognised as one of the truly great science fiction and fantasy writers. I am profoundly impressed with each new book of hers that I read. She creates complex, interesting characters, places them in well-constructed settings, and tells engaging stories in finely crafted language that, in addition to entertaining, explore a host of challenging themes and leave the reader with something more to think about.

And range. Has she got range. Her body of work to date runs right across the spectrum from hard sf to high fantasy, and when she gets tired of the standard sub-genres in speculative fiction, well, she just mixes and matches until she comes up with something she likes. And she’s frighteningly prolific. Her first novel, Hammered, was published in 2005. Since then she’s released nine novels, one collection of linked short stories and novellas, a collection of stand alone short stories and a tenth novel co-written with Sarah Monette. At my last count (and I could be wrong), she has three more novels finished and in the pipeline, with at least two or three more in various stages of development.

And I’ve read most of the published books (though I haven’t gotten around to writing about all of them yet), and the ones I haven’t are sitting on my TBR shelf.

Today, I’m going to talk in glowing terms about her alternate history/steampunk/urban fantasy/vampire detective book, New Amsterdam. New Amsterdam is that collections of linked stories I mentioned above. is set in an alternate Earth at the beginning of the 20th century, a world in which the colonial project in the new world unfolded somewhat differently, thanks to the war magic of the indigenous peoples. There was no American revolution, and no unchecked drive across the vast new continent. England has only recently acquired the former Dutch colonies, and remains on the verge of war with France.

It’s also a world where vampires are quite real and function, to varying degrees, openly in society, and sorcery is recognised as a valued skill in a number of situations occupations, including that of forensic investigator. Which brings us to the absolutely unforgettable protagonists of the stories: Lady Abigail Irene Garrett, working in New Amsterdam as a Detective Crown Investigator and forensic sorceress, and Sebastian de Ulloa, ancient and powerful vampire, who travels to the world with his companion Jack Priest. Crime-solving is Abby Irene’s profession, and appears to be a hobby of Sebastian’s (which he approaches in a manner which seems to me somewhat reminiscent of the Great Detective himself, Sherlock Holmes).

Of course, events bring them together, and of course they solve mysteries and crimes together and become entangled in each other's lives and face grave dangers that neither can escape without the other (and of course, don't forget Jack, who is quite involved in all of this as well).

One of the wonderful things about these stories is how cleverly they both follow and subvert the standard tropes of the vampire detective/urban fantasy genre – which I love on its own, but here, where it has been carefully deconstructed and rebuilt in a way that is both comfortably familiar and delightfully different, is much stronger meat, and well worth the careful digestion to bring out its rich and mature flavour. This is a real, complex world, with characters that have complicated histories, needs and desires, multi-layered and conflicting intentions, motivations and loyalties, political considerations, secrets, deceptions, risks and consequences – all the stuff that Bear is so very good at, and which makes her work a true delight to read.

Blood Bank, Tanya Huff

Tanya Huff’s Blood books, featuring Vicki Nelson, homicide cop turned private investigator, Henry Fitzroy, vampire writer of bodice rippers, and Mike Celluci, Nelson’s former partner on the force, have long been favourites of mine. In fact, if I have my publications dates right, Huff pretty much invented the urban fantasy crime-solving genre with these books (they were preceded by Mercedes Lackey’s Diana Tregarde Investigations series, but the first of the Blood books was published well before the sub-genre became so popular), which is rather a remarkable feat, considering how many variations on the theme there are now in publication.

Huff brought the series to a close some years ago in a profoundly final fashion, but this volume collects the handful of short stories that feature Vicki, Mike and/or Henry, and as such is a welcome chance to return to some beloved characters.

Roman Dusk, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

As much as I adore Yarbro's great creation, the vampire Saint Germain, I must admit that some aspects of the novels become repetitive - Saint Germain's endless difficulties with troublesome civil servants who just don't trust him and want to extort money from him while preparing to expose him for whatever it is that they suspect him of being being a very large entry on that list. Usually, the repetitive aspects are, for me, more than cancelled out by the richness of historical detail, the twists and turns of the current chapter in Saint Germain's long life, and more often than not, the character and constraints surrounding the women who are an essential part of the vampire's life.

However, this time around, the setting - Rome during the time of the Emperor Heliobagalus - is not all that deeply explored, and we have seen both Saint Germain and Olivia in Rome before, and facing exactly the same kinds of bureaucratic persecution before. Yarbro does explore the growing presence, activism and persecution of Christians in this volume - in fact, that's a significant element of the difficulties faced by both of Saint Germain's significant female companions in this book - and the decadent fusion of sex and sadism of not just the Imperial court but much of Roman culture of the time, and her attention to detail is as always comprehensive and precise. But... I think next time I'd prefer to see Saint Germain in some place and time a bit further removed from the settings of earlier novels.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it - just not quite as much as many of her other Saint Germain books.

Fledgling, Octavia Butler

This was Octavia Butler’s last published work, and I am deeply saddened that there will be no more new books. She left us far too soon, with so much more to say.

In Fledgeling, Butler takes the body of vampire legend and literature and turns it completely upside-down, turning the mythos of the predatory and solitary night stalker into a tale of an ancient and complex society of long-living, blood-drinking humanoids called the Ina and their at least nominally willing human symbionts.

Many of the topics that Butler has examined in her earlier works – among them identity, kinship, sex, gender, race, relationships between individual peoples, races and species, change and transformation, power, coercion and free – are strong themes in this book.

The story begins with a single, self-aware being, alone, in pain, and without memory of the past or knowledge of origins, with little more than the urge to survive as a guide to self-definition. These twin instincts – self-preservation and self-identification – drive the narrative as the protagonist seeks her identity, her past and her future, struggling all the while to discover who it is that has robbed her of so much of her past, and why.

In terms of identity, what you see is most definitely not what you get – the protagonist, Shori, appears, in human eyes, as a weak and traumatised black, female, human child, but she is instead a powerful, decades-old near-immortal who lives by exchanging intense, erotic pleasure for human blood. As she begins to form her own family of human symbionts, the narrative travels into uncomfortable places, depicting a sexual relationship between an adult white male and a black female child – who is actually older, stronger, and not human at all, and whose saliva contains substances that are both addictive and beneficial to humans, offering them improved health and longer life in return for their blood.

Shori, we discover, is the future – or at least one possible future – of the Ina, her melanin-rich skin (the gift of a mixture of genes from a black human) giving her the ability to walk by day as none of her Ina cousins can. And yet this human “taint” marks her as an outcast and potential target among those of the Ina who reject change and value “pure blood” over new potentials, tradition, no matter how limiting, over technological advances that bring greater freedom..

Triply Other – black among whites, Ina among humans, genetic experiment among Ina, Shori is kin to both species but welcomed by neither, and must find her own sense of who she is.

And that’s just the stuff that’s easy to put into words.

Thinking about this book after reading it, I wondered what Butler might have been saying about the history of black Americans in this story. Our initial view of Shori seems in so many way like the situation of black Africans brought to America as slaves, cut off from families and societies, their history torn from them, struggling to survive in physical bodies marked by their new world as weak, childish, not fully human – yet all the while, bearing within greater strength and power, and ancient traditions and wisdoms. I may be completely off the wall here, but I think I see in Shori’s quest for identity, family, security and recognition some sense – nothing so obvious and crude as allegory – of the issues faced in the journey of black people in North America toward all of these things.

And it seemed to me as I finished reading that Shori’s journey wasn’t over. Maybe Butler intended to give us more, or maybe she intended us to think about it ourselves. We likely will never know.

Dead Sexy, Tate Hallaway

This is the second of Tate Hallaway’s supernatural romance novels, featuring the adventures of Garnet Lacey, witch on the run with a penchant for getting tangled up with vampire lovers, vengeance goddesses, and just plain wonderfully weird shit.

Garnet is trying to live quietly in Madison, Wisconsin, following the murder of all the members of her coven by a Vatican hit squad, and Garnet’s overshadowing by the goddess Lilith – who promptly took out the Vatican assassins. But it’s hard to hide that many bodies forever, and now the FBI is looking for her for questioning. And if that wasn’t bad enough, suddenly the town is just crawling with zombies – and you know that’s always bad news.

Hallaway – who is actually the alter-ego of Lyda Morehouse, author of the Archangel Protocol books – has a delightfully light touch that carries the reader through twists and turns of plot as Garnet tries to keep the FBI agent from finding out too much, deal with the zombie invasion, and keep current lover Sebastian from finding out that she’s letting former lover Parrish crash in her storage locker.

Dead Sexy is quick-paced, cleverly tongue-in-cheek (what else can you call a book that opens with a zombie buying a copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Voodoo - with counterfeit cash?) and a hell of a fun read.

Smoke and Ashes, Tanya Huff

The third in Huff’s latest contemporary fantasy series featuring Tony Foster (mostly self-taught wizard and TV production staffer) and Henry FitzRoy (the vampire son of Henry VIII), Smoke and Ashes is another grand romp through the fantastical and the theatrical.

In this adventure, Tony discovers that one of the stunt women working on set is a 3,000 year-old living - but completely sealed - Hellgate. Worse than that, an army of demons is taking advantage of the Grand Convergence to cross over into our world, and if she is killed by demons attracted to the power that emanates from her, it will open up the gate contained within her to a major invasion from the dimensions of Hell.

Working with Tony and Henry to save the world are all the familiar faces from the cast and crew of the world’s best syndicated vampire detective TV show filmed in Vancouver (except for one, of course). But Smoke and Ashes is primetime entertainment.

The Coldfire Trilogy, by C. S. Friedman:
Black Sun Rising
When True Night Falls
Crown of Shadows

Imagine a world that responds in a direct and material way to your hopes, your dreams, your faith … and your fears. Friedman’s Coldfire Trilogy (part science fiction, part dark fantasy) is set on such a world, the very distant planet Erna, colonised more than a thousand years ago by settlers from Earth (in a universe without convenient faster-than-light space travel, so that the colonists are well and truly on their own. Unknown to the settlers, Erna harbours – in fact, is permeated with - a previously unknown kind of energy, which its newest inhabitants call the fae.

The interaction of thought, imagination and emotion with fae energy results in the real, material, manifestation of those thoughts, imaginings and emotions. For the native intelligent species of Erna, the rakh, this is a process they have evolved within, and manipulation of the fae is automatic and instinctively controlled. However, for the human colonists, it is often involuntary, often uncontrollable, and often draws on their strongest and deepest fears and terrors, with the consequence that the colony is almost destroyed by the horrors taken from the subconscious minds of its members and made flesh. Over time, human society adapts, finds ways to cope with life in a place where anything you imagine, even your gods, can become real. Technology reverts to pre-industrial levels – the less complex a thing is, the less your mind can cause to go wrong with it. Some people – perhaps naturally evolving, perhaps changed by the presence of the fae around them or the hopes of the colonists for some form of adaptation – are born with the ability to see, and to consciously use the fae for their own ends. Humanity survives.

Some nine hundred years before the time period in which the novels are set, one man, Gerald Tarrant, later called the Prophet, sees the potential for a better future for humanity on Erna if faith and trust in a beneficent and protective God and His Church can be so created and nurtured and channelled that there is no deep well of fear in the darkest corners of human minds for the fae to work with. His Church begins to grow, but Tarrant himself fails in faith and falls into pride and despair and the certainty of damnation.

As the first novel begins, the Church is powerful but by no means sufficiently monolithic to bring about its long-held vision to deliver humans on Erna from the dangers of the fae through faith in the one god. Most humans have learned how to avoid or moderate, at least often enough to survive and occasionally thrive, the worst effects of living with the fae. Adepts and sorcerers Work with it. Horrors old and new still threaten humans who are careless, caught unaware, or simply unlucky. And having made a bargain with the dark forces of Erna to avoid death, Gerald Tarrant, now called the Hunter, walks the night and preys on human blood and fear.

But there is something else happening on Erna as well, and despite mutual distrust and antipathy, both Tarrant and a sorcerer-priest, Damien Kilcannon Vryce, are drawn into an uneasy working relationship in an attempt to discover what lies behind the strange memory loss of an Adept, Ciani of Faraday. What they discover will lead them further on a journey that has the potential to save – or end – human life on Erna.

By binding together in such a quest a devout and committed priest who is also a sorcerer, and the undead and sworn to evil founder of the Church he adheres to, Friedman sets the scene for a complex and nuanced exploration of the nature of good and evil, purity and corruption, faith and despair, of fall and redemption, sacrifice and rebirth, and the classic ethical and moral issue: do the ends justify the means? Can any good come of allying with a creature so completely sworn to evil as Tarrant the Hunter? Can the Hunter justify an attempt to save humanity without forswearing his allegiance to evil? Can either man remain what he is in the presence of the other? And if one, or both, change, what are the consequences both for them and for their quest? Friedman herself offers a glimpse into the kinds of questions she has chosen to consider in the writing of this trilogy:

The religious themes in CF? They are the meat of the series for me, an investigation in to the nature and ramifications of human faith the way only SF can explore it. What will our religions become when god actually answers our prayers? Are we prepared to deal with the kind of power we say we want? How does good inspire man, how does evil corrupt him, and what are the names of the ten thousand shades of gray in between? The fae provides a mirror that lets us see all these issues more clearly and postulate how they might affect us. I believe there is a beauty in religious faith that transcends the doctrine of any one religion, and I struggled to capture that beauty. (source)

And in addition to giving the reader a great deal to think about, it’s also a well-written, well-plotted story with compelling protagonists, intriguing antagonists, strong secondary characters, a well-developed setting and lots of action. My main complaint is that so many of Friedman’s memorable women characters either die or are left behind as Vryce and Tarrant struggle on through challenge after challenge to the end of their journeys.

States of Grace, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Another Saint Germain novel is always a source of great delight for me. I freely admit that there’s a formula to the Saint Germain books, and the key plot points can be seen coming in advance, but as always, the way that Yarbro particularises her selected themes to a specific time and place delight the history buff in me.

This episode in the vampire count’s life takes place in Europe during the Reformation. Saint Germain is heavily invested in the new business of publishing, owning presses in both Venice and Germany, and must deal with issues of censorship fueled by religious intolerance on both sides of the great spiritual debate – even though the books he aims to publish are not in themselves religious books, but rather what in the time of the Reformation would be the best available scientific and cultural studies.

I can’t help thinking that this book, which addresses censorship of the press directly (censorship and religious intolerance are frequently depicted in the Saint Germain books), is Yarbro’s comment on the growing interference (at least in North America) of a particular religious view – fundamentalist Christianity – on the teaching and publishing of science, and more generally, the dangers that religious fundamentalisms of all kinds pose to true intellectual inquiry when they gain the power to dictate what is and is not acceptable in a society.

Tall, Dark and Dead, Tate Hallaway

It's pretty much an open secret that Lyda Morehouse, the author of a truly wonderful religious cyberpunk series of novels - Archangel Protocol, Fallen Host, Messiah Node and Apocalypse Array - is currently writing "supernatural romance" under the name Tate Hallaway. While I hope someday to see more Lyda Morehouse novels with the sf bite of the Archangel series, the first Tate Hallaway is a lot of fun to read, too, and I'm awaiting the publication of the second one with some impatience.

Tall, Dark and Dead is an adventure-romance about a witch on the run and a vampire who wasn't turned in the usual way. There's humour, and sex, and plot twists, and blood and magic and betrayals and a nicely crafted love story, plus some solid knowledge of occult matters (although as a former professional astrologer myself, I have a small nit to pick with her on the distinction between progressions and transits). There are also some welcome Morehouse touches - for instance, the Vatican has a secret squad of witch-hunting assassins. A good read.

I’m way behind on the grand project I embarked on almost a year ago, which was to actually keep an annotated record of the books I read. So, to try to get back on an even footing for the all-too-quickly-approaching New Year, here are some thumbnail sketches of some of the the science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction novels that I’ve read in recent months (actually, more like the past six months or thereabouts) and haven’t yet written about.


The World of the Fae Trilogy – Anne Bishop
Shadows and Light
The House of Gaian

I wrote briefly about the first volume in this series back at the beginning of the year. It took a while, but I have at last finished the trilogy. It’s interesting – what first interested me about the series was Bishop’s elves – the fae – and their relationship with the witches – almost all women – who are the physical and mystical bond that maintains the link between the human world and the world of the fae. However, what came to dominate my perceptions of the books as I read them was the horrifying and all-too-believable war on women that drives the storyline. Think of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, of the male-dominated society portrayed in the early books of Suzy McKee Charnas’ Holdfast Chronicles, of the utterly evil misogyny that almost destroys both elves and pagan humankind in Gael Baudino’s Strands series. In many ways, Bishop’s trilogy reminds me most of Baudino’s work, in fact, because in both, the answer to hatred and misogyny comes from the mingling of traditions, elven, pagan/wiccan, and human.


The Darker Jewels Trilogy – Anne Bishop
Daughter of the Blood
Heir to the Shadows
Queen if the Darkness

A very different setting and cast of characters from Bishop’s World of the Fae series, although it’s interesting to see that the themes of gender-based power struggles, separate but interconnected worlds or dimensions, and the discovery of lost heritages are also strong elements in the Darker Jewels series. This series is an interesting exploration of power – political power, psychic or magical power, sexual power, the power of conviction and honour, the power of love and hate. And there’s also a nice twist on the standard light=good, dark=bad iconography in a great deal of modern fiction: The devils and the undead are, as much as anyone can be, the good guys here.


The Big Over Easy - Jasper Fforde

Jack Spratt is a detective. He works the Nursery Crimes beat. His latest case: who killed Humpty Dumpty and why? Only Jasper Fforde could have written this book, and I’m glad he did. Absolutely hilarious, and full of not-so-subtle digs at the entirety of the detective genre.


Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlein

After I did the “50 most influential” meme, I just couldn’t resist. I have, after all, been on a project to reread some of the science fiction I grew up with, and Heinlein is a big part of that. I’ve written elsewhere about my love-hate relationship with Heinlein, and this is one of the ones that really pushes all of those buttons. It’s a fun action story, but, and but, and but… tell me again how flogging people publicly makes for a crime-free state. And why military service is the only kind of service to the state that demonstrates one has a sense of responsibility and commitment. And why men are big infantry lugs and women are dainty ship’s pilots and in the future there are no tough ass-kicking grunts like Jenette Goldstein’s Vasquez in Aliens who can smash Bugs with the best of them.


The Puppet Masters - Robert Heinlein

This was the uncut version, although to be honest, it’s been so long since I’d read the original that I didn’t realise this until my partner pointed it out. Then it was sort of obvious – the sex wouldn’t have been quite so explicit in the early 50s when this was first published, but I’ve read so much of Heinlein’s later work, where the sex is pretty much unending, that I didn’t notice. glaurung_quena, who actually compared the versions as part of a grad school paper on Heinlein, also tells me that the first publication had also toned down some of the elements intended to evoke the horror of being possessed, but I remember finding it chilling back in the 60s when I first read it, and it’s still chilling at that level. What I didn’t see so clearly when I first read the novel, although I’ve long since figured it out, was how the puppet masters are so openly paralleled with Russian state communism/totalitarianism. And how much this is a cold war, McCarthyist horror tale in which the communists could be anywhere, even in bed beside you, and you’d never know unless you practised unrelenting vigilance.

One thing that I had not noticed before was that for once, Heinlein’s super-competent, super-sexy, gun-toting female protagonist has a real psychology behind her. Mary, who we learn in the last chapter of the book has undergone horrifying experiences as a child including one of the more traumatic kinds of abandonment imaginable, is almost certainly overcompensating out of a form of PTSD – even if Heinlein didn’t have a clinical description of the condition available to him at the time. Which finally clears up one aspect of her behaviour that always bothered me – her about-face virtual submission to the male protagonist after he rejects her emotionally and assaults her.


Smoke and Mirrors - Tanya Huff

The second of the Tony and Fitzroy novels, though this one is somewhat Fitzroy-light. Doesn’t matter, Tony does just fine. And let me assure you, this is one killer of a haunted house story. With all the insanity of a TV location shoot thrown in for laughs. I’m really loving these books.


The Wizard of the Grove duology – Tanya Huff
Child of the Grove
The Last Wizard

I first read Child of the Grove years ago, alerted by a friend who knew Huff and had read the book in manuscript, and it was this book that made me an instant fan of Huff’s work. It’s always been an interesting duology – the first book is heroic, mythic, epic in nature, all about the wars of nations and the clashes of ancient powers, a classic good versus evil scenario, although with a greater degree of sophistication than many such. The Last Wizard is much smaller and more personal book – what is the life of the hero after the quest is over. Of course, there’s magic and adventure and all of that good high fantasy stuff, but it’s more about the last wizard herself, and what does she do now that she’s met her destiny and survived. An unexpectedly mature sequel to a fine high fantasy epic.


More to come....

I have a vampire fetish. Male, female, good, bad or inbetween (though I prefer the ones who are, while somewhat ambiguous, mostly good), I'll read about any of them at least once.

One of my favourite literary vampires is Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's magnificent creation, Ferencz Rakoczy Count Saint-Germain - or multitudes of variations thereon. Yarbro has written some 20 historical fantasy novels (and counting) about Saint Germain and the other vampires "of his blood" - that is, vampires he has created.

Hotel Transylvania, the first novel Yarbro wrote in the cycle (though not the first one in the life of Saint-Germain) was published in 1978, and is based very loosely on historical references to a Compte de Saint-Germain who made a certain name for himself in upper class 18th century European society as an inventor, an alchemist and a man of mystery. More than one occult organization has featured in its own writings the historical Saint-Germain's claims to be immortal or nearly so, and a mystical adept of great power and knowledge, and he often shows up in the more occult-inspired conspiracy theories.

Yarbro's fictional Saint-Germain uses some of the historical Compte's attributes - he is an alchemist and a student of some forms of occult philosophy, his manner is that of a nobleman or courtier, and he is highly literate and well travelled. He can also write independently and simultaneously with both hands - a trait that the historical Saint-Germain supposedly had, and shared with a number of legendary Chinese sages and healers. The vampire count has, of course, studied in China.

From this beginning, Yarbro has over the course of the novels developed the story of the vampire Saint-Germain. Born circa 2000 BC at the dark of the year into a proto-Etruscan royal family ruling somewhere in the mountains of Carpathia, he is initiated into a vampiric priesthood as a child. As a young man, still an initiate but not yet a vampire himself, he survives the invasion and destruction of his homeland, is taken into slavery, leads an unsuccessful revolt and is executed by disembowelment - leaving his spinal cord intact, and allowing him to rise as a vampire.

Yarbro's vampires - Saint-Germain, and the other vampires in her books, almost all women he has loved, or people they in turn have loved - survive on blood, animal if necessary but human when possible, but to thrive, they also need to "drink" powerful human emotion. In the religion of his long-vanished homeland, the vampires are the gods, and their priests nurture them with freely-given blood, love and devotion, becoming gods in turn when they die. Some vampires, including Saint Germain in his early centuries, feed themselves on the terror they can evoke in their prey. This, however, is not the Saint-Germain that Yarbro gives us. While in several of the books, Saint-Germain refers to these early centuries as a time of immaturity ruled by anger and vengeance when he fed on blood, fear and death, Yarbro's novels focus on a mature vampire who chooses to sustain himself by inducing sexual ecstasy when he feeds, usually on women, who are for the most part unaware of his actions, as he uses the hypnotic powers of his kind to approach then while they sleep, takes very little blood, and leaves them with memories of erotic dreams. Sometimes he finds people who, for any number of reasons, are willing to be a partner to him, not always with full knowledge of what he is. Always, he seeks but rarely finds the ultimate nurturance of the conscious giver of both blood and love.

Most of the novels tell the story of one of those rare times when Saint-Germain finds a remarkable woman who dares to go against the sexual, social and religious laws of their society to love a vampire.

One interesting aspect of the sexual bond he creates is that, in Yarbro's universe, male vampires are impotent - a rather logical development, seeing as they have no heartbeat and therefore no blood circulation. Sex for Saint-Germain is exclusively about creating pleasure - primarily for women, and then deriving his sustenance from that pleasure.

Because Saint-Germain prefers to create these bonds with women, the novels that Yarbro centres on him are also inevitably explorations of the lives that women lived and the limitations they faced in the various times and places throughout history in which she places her vampire count. Yarbro's novels are always extensively researched, and the reader cannot avoid being struck, over and over again, by the ways in which women's lives have been circumscribed the ways in which men have viewed women in various societies, and the great difficulties and often fatal consequences experienced by most women who stepped out of the narrow lives prescribed for them throughout history.

This theme runs even deeper in the handful of novels that Yarbro has written from the viewpoints of two of the female vampires created by Saint-Germain: Olivia Clemens, trapped wife of a sadistic but socially and politically powerful rapist, made a vampire in Nero's Rome; and Madelaine de Montalia, selected to be the victim of a Satanist cult, made a vampire in 18th century France. Where the books about Saint-Germain have a large dose of historical adventure in them, the books focused on Olivia and Madelaine, while still adventurous, are also detailed examinations of how difficult it has been for an independent and unconventional woman to manage her own life at just about every point in time in the last 2000 years.

The interesting question for me is this: while the books have strong feminist themes - as well as other equally powerful themes, such as the futility of war, the terrible consequences of xenophobia and intolerance of all kinds, the corrupting influence of power and the importance of freedom - is Saint-Germain, the vampire, himself a feminist? (there is no doubt that Madelaine, who survives into the 20th century, is a feminist, and that Olivia, who dies the True Death in 17th century France, almost certainly would have been.)

Certainly, throughout all the books, Saint-Germain is drawn to and celebrates the personal power and accomplishments of strong women. He can only create a true bond with a woman who has the courage to make her own choices, choices which often go against some of the strongest prohibition of her culture. For centuries Saint-Germain has watched the women he is dependent on for his survival struggle against the weight of every limitation imaginable - he has seen women treated as property, sold into slavery, raped and tortured, thrown into nunneries that were really prisons, set aside as unimportant, killed for being women in situations where no man would have been so treated, at the very best admonished as the weaker sex, the less competent sex, the sex more prone to error and weakness.

In earlier centuries, the reader often finds him working to restore self-esteem in women who have been treated brutally by the men of their society - and not just women he has fed on or plans to feed on. In times closer to our own, he is seen encouraging women in the process of self-emancipation. No longer human himself, he lives by codes of justice and honour that grow increasingly archaic as time marches on, but unlike so many men of history, Saint-Germain actually sees women as people. He respects them, even though he must use them to survive, for willing partners are rare; he tries to give fair return for what he takes, both with the dreams he creates and, when possible, with material recompense of some kind when it is within his circumstances.

But he does take, almost always without consent. And that taking involves sex - at least for the women he takes blood and energy from - and his use of power, even if it is the power of a non-human being. It fits the definition of rape. This more-than-human being who has chosen for at least the last 2,000 years to respect and protect women because it is the right and just thing to do, also forces women to experience sexual pleasure for his own purposes on a regular basis, and does not really think of this as the same kind of behaviour he has punished other men throughout his long journey for engaging in. And what do we say about Olivia and Madelaine, who take (mostly) men in their sleep, without their consent, giving them wet dreams while they feed on the pleasure and the blood. That fits the definition of rape as well.

But then, there is the fact that none of them are human anymore - does that make a difference? And they need to drink emotion with the blood - does the drive to survive outweigh the morality of what they must do to survive? Are they to be congratulated for choosing sexual emotion over terror, or are they simply justifying to themselves acts that can have no justification? Despite all the other things they do that are good - and they all, were they human, would be considered good, often heroic people - are they irredeemable because they survive on what they take by deceit and force from others?

I don't really have an answer, unless it is to point out that, like Yarbro's vampires, most of us would not be living the lives we do without reaping the benefits of some form of exploitation - theft and violation by force - committed somewhere in the world today. If Saint-Germain is irredeemable, what about the rest of us?

The Saint-Germain books:

Hotel Transylvania (1978) - 18th century France
The Palace (1978) - Renaissance Florence
Blood Games (1980) - 1st century Rome
Path of the Eclipse (1981) - 13th century China, Tibet and India
Tempting Fate (1982) - Russia and Germany, early 20th century
The Saint-Germain Chronicles (1983) - short story collection, dates range from 17th century to 1980, mostly set in Europe and North America
A Flame in Byzantium (1987) - Olivia Clemens - 6th century Byzantium
Crusader's Torch (1988) - Olivia Clemens - 12th century Palestine
A Candle for D'Artagnan (1989) - Olivia Clemens - 17th century Italy and France
Out of the House of Life (1990) - Madeleine de Montalia - Egypt, both 19th century, and between 1500-500 BC
Darker Jewels (1993) - 16th century Poland and Russia
Better in the Dark (1993) - 10th century northern Europe
Mansions of Darkness (1996) - 17th century Peru
Writ in Blood (1997) - early 20th century Russia and England
Blood Roses (1998) - 14th century France
Communion Blood (1999) - late 17th century Rome
Come Twilight (2000) - Spain, covering a 500-year period starting mid 7th century
A Feast in Exile (2001) - 14th century India
Night Blooming (2002) - late 8th century France and Rome
Midnight Harvest (2003) - 1930s USA
Dark of the Sun (2004) - 6th century Asia
In the Face of Death (2004) - Madeleine de Montalia - 19th century USA
States of Grace (2005) - early 16th century Italy and Netherlands
Roman Dusk (2006) - 3rd century Rome

I've been reading or re-reading the Saint-Germain books over the past few years, and I'm almost completely caught up. So far this year, I've read: Writ in Blood, Crusader's Torch, Darker Jewels, Out of the House of Life, and In the Face of Death. I'm currently reading A Feast in Exile, and then I'll have read the entire series with the exception of States of Grace and the newest book, Roman Dusk, which is due out soon in hardcover.

Smoke and Shadows by Tanya Huff

I've been a Tanya Huff fan for longer than she's been published. See, I used to know a guy who knew her well, and had been granted the great honour of reading her first novel prior to publication. He raved about it. And I knew him to be a man of good and discerning taste, so when that first novel was published, I went out and bought it right away. And the next one, and the one after that.

Huff may be best known for her "Victory Nelson" series - five novels about a former Toronto cop, now private detective with night blindness, a helpful ex-partner from the force, and a complicated relationship with the vampire bastard son of Henry VIII, who now writes bodice-rippers for a living.

Smoke and Shadows is the first novel in a stand-alone spin-off series from the Victory Nelson novels. Vicky's vampire, Henry Fitzroy, is now living in Vancouver, as is Tony Foster, a friend and sometime lover of Henry's who was once a street kid. Of course, you just know that folks who could find weird adventures with demons and wizards and werewolves and the like in toronto are going to have no problem running into the same kind of thing in Vancouver.

It's a good urban fantasy (which is definitely Huff's specialty), and it's also, in its setting, a hilarious send-up of the made-in-Canada action/supernatural TV syndication series industry. If you're a fan of Forever Knight or any of its more recent kin, you'll enjoy the goings-on from that perspective as well.

Reading Tanya Huff's novels makes me happy. I'm so glad she's already written two more novels in this new series for me to read.