Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn (2005)
| Overall |  | Story | |
| Re-Readability |  | Characters | |
The best way to describe this book is to as YA “Anita Blake” novel. That may be unfair to Ms. Vaughn, but there’s not much ground covered here in the first book of a series that hasn’t been set up by Laurel K. Hamilton’s vampire hunter series — the vampires, the werewolves, the hunters of monsters, they all feel somehow familiar.
So it’s worth noting some of the differences, before you buy (or reject) this book based on that description.
- The book is set in Denver (Vaughn lives in Boulder), though the setting gets sort of short shrift here.
- The protagonist is herself one of the monsters — a werewolf of three years, and low girl on the pack totem pole.
- The basic conceit of the plot — Kitty is a late-night DJ who sort of falls into starting an call-in show for supernatural critters and their loved ones — is delightful, probably the most original aspect of the book, and allows for exploration of a lot of the standard issues in a didactic manner that doesn’t feel as intrusive to the story as in similar genre gooks.
- There is 95.9% less porn than in an Anita Blake novel.
Aside from that, there are a lot of recognizable memes for this genre — vamps as elegant, ennuish immortals; vamps and werewolves getting all territorial over the city; werewolves emulating lots of wolf-like behavior (generally to the detriment of their humanity); lots of angst over what it means to be human; mysterious government and religious conspiracies; frightening yet amusing stone cold killler vampire hunters; etc. and usw. and nothing startling bursts from any of these pages.
The fact is, Vaughn isn’t as richly detailed and clever a writer as Hamilton, yet (in this volume, at least — and I have the next few on order) she come across also as less artificial and better edited, not to mention just plain old more approachable. The problems and plot complications that Kitty faces are similar to some that Anita does, but without the ever-escalating power levels or the vampire/lycanthrope porn that has made the Anita Blake series practically unreadable for the last several years.
This was just a fun book, enjoyable and fast read, and if it’s not Dostoevsky, it makes no pretensions to being so. Recommended for folks looking for this sort of thing. As noted, I’m picking up the next couple.
She comes across being much the same way in person – straightforward, approachable, well-spoken.
That struck me on her website. Very unpretentious.
Fun books, all of them.
Reassuring to know.
I will say that the second book Kitty Goes to Washington was even better — plenty of fun, but breaking some reasonable new ground in the series. The tropes aren’t unique, but they’re put to good use.