Ilona Andrews’ Builds Kate Daniels’ SeriesTo Greatest Strength in Magic Strikes

The husband-wife writing team of Gordon and Ilona Andrews build fresh strength into their Kate Daniels’ urban fantasy series with the third entry, Magic Strikes. I devoured it, right after finishing Magic Burns.

Kate Daniels is a stone killer of ghastly supernatural beings in a world where magic and technology exist as erratically alternating realities that wash across the Atlanta landscape. The origins of Kate’s considerable magical resources – and magical sword called the Slayer – are cloaked in mystery in Magic Bites and Magic Burns. They become clear in the third novel in a back story as exotic and compelling as any of the thousand-and-one tales of Arabian nights. Andrews so deftly hides this back story that the reader is hardly aware of this missing element in the first two action-packed tales. We are used to stories commencing in media res (in the middle of things), and do not require every last detail about a hero’s biography. Does anyone care whether Sam Spade grew up in Iowa or California? Probably not. But Kate's back story matters. A lot.

Another subplot that keeps the stories steaming along is the mutual attraction between Kate and the lord of the shape shifters, the were-lion king Curran. His Beastliness, as the smart-mouth Kate calls him, has been keeping closer tabs on her than she’s known until this third novel.

“'His Majesty needs a can-I girl . . . and I’m not it,'” Kate tells a friend and a were-hyena at lunch. Asked to explain, Kate “leaned back. ‘Can I fetch you your food, Your Majesty? Can I tell you how strong and mighty you are, Your Majesty? Can I pick out your fleas, Your Majesty? Can I kiss your ass, Your Majesty? Can I . . .’”

At this point, Kate realizes the others have gone eerily silent. “'Technically, it should be may I’” Curran says without missing a beat from behind her. Like all cats, he has the gift of silent feet, even in human form.

This is a couple in the tradition of Hollywood’s fast-talking babes and smart-mouthed tough guys – a Nick and Nora Charles for a world where myth, murder, and mayhem meld in a seamless, intelligent blend. Long may they reign. In the first two books, they have slaughtered legions of the undead and vanquished an evil god trying to incarnate and destroy humankind. No wonder this busy pair do not have time for romance.

It’s taken three books for readers’ to get a figurative handle on Kate Daniels and for Curran to move in to get a literal handle on this killer chick with blood that can freeze in a cannibal villain’s veins, creating needles that rip him from the inside-out.

The denouement of Magic Strikes is a richly imaginative whorl of demons and monsters. Each new phantasmagorical creature is pulled from the far reaches of creativity that awe and delight me. How do the Andrews think of this stuff? The long story arc of the three novels, including the slow character development of Kate, astonishing revelations about the secondary character Shaiman, and the simmering romance, cohere gracefully. The third book was well worth the wait, and I am eager for four promised additions to this series.

McCullough's Hero with Chaos in HisEyes Disappoints in CodeSpell

CodeSpell is the third entry in Kelley McCullough’s series about Ravirn/Raven, a 23-year-old hacker descended from the gods and goddesses of the Greek Pantheon. The first book, WebMage, is a unique blend of urban fantasy and cyberpunk fiction, seasoned with Greek myth. The series starts with Ravirn, a mortal descendent of the deities with superhuman powers, and an implausible plot about a magical mweb through which the immortals communicate.

By the second novel, Cybermancy, Ravirn has been banished from the House of the Fates, handmaidens to Necessity. Necessity has become the not-so-artificial computer intelligence that runs the universe. The plot is about how Persephone codes a virus into Necessity, The virus secures Persephone’s permanent release from Hades, where she has been unhappily forced to dwell for the six cold months of the year since time immemorial. The virus also knocks out vast portions of the m[agic]web.

The swirling stuff of Chaos appears in his eyes when Ravirn is transformed into the Raven. He is able to transform himself into a large version of that bird and to travel through chaos with greater mastery. He also is now a lord of his own royal house outside of space and time, rather than scion of the Fates.

CodeSpell picks up the story. Ravirn is tasked with rebooting Necessity, down for the count with the Persephone virus. During the time of the reboot, Ravirn and powers competing to get there first will be able to refashion the Universe, should he or they presume to do so.

A secondary plot is Ravirn’s romance with Cerise, another child of the royal Houses of Fate. A true child of order, Cerise is a crack programmer to Ravirn’s rebellious hacker. She is disturbed by the chaos in Ravirn’s eyes. She returns home to the Fates, to work on security programs in face of threats from the broken mweb. This leaves the field open for Tisiphone, one of the three Furies, who lusts for Ravirn.

Winged Tisiphone is naked with fire where strippers usually strategically place sequins. This is too much like an adolescent’s wet dream to be appealing. No doubt this is McCullough’s target readership, not an old babe like me.

CodeSpell is proof that there can be too much of a good thing. WebMage was unique, one of those unexpected finds that appear serendipitously on a library shelf. Cybermancy was a good effort to wrap up some loose ends at the end of book one. Ravirn’s transformation to a character of comic-book proportions and the increasing incredulous plot twists mean that I may not make it to the end of CodeSpell, Ravirn Book 3. I won’t be reading Mythos, which will be released in May.

Significance of Place in Urban FantasyAnd Burke's Robicheaux Novels

The lyrical pose of James Lee Burke is no less evocative when he writes about the West, where he has lived and taught for many years. Yet I found myself unable to complete Swan Peak, the first time I have not completed a Burke book. My fascination with New Orleans led me to his detective Dave Robicheaux mysteries. The stories he sets anywhere else do not have the same effect on me. How even can the title, Swan Peak, compare with the gleeful rhythms and visions conjured by titles such as

• The Tin Roof Blow Down
• Pegasus Descending
• A Morning for Flamingos
• Jolie Blon’s Bounce
• A Stained White Radiance or, my personal all-time favorite,
• In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead.

The dream of New Orleans is so deeply rooted in my soul I cannot trace its sinuous hold. Did it start because I had studied French from first grade until I was 20, and New Orleans is the only French-speaking city in the United States? If so, why did I not fantasize about Quebec, practically next door to my upstate New York hometown?

Was it the novel, Dinner at Antoine’s, on the library shelf that hinted at a place in America as foreign as France? By the time I discovered Dr. John in his voodoo chant regalia and the Mardi Gras Indian bands, such as the Wild Tchoupitoulas that were briefly popular in the 1970s, my interest in New Orleans, Louisiana (NOLA) was cemented.

The first time my marriage broke up, I threw just about all the clothing I owned in the backseat of a beat-up Beetle (what else? in that era), crunched some uppers and drove to New Orleans in 24 hours. My first sight of the antebellum mansions along the Gulf Coast – now swept away by hurricane Katrina – is so strong that I have dared not visit that ravaged area since my last drive there in November 2004.

No wonder I have been drawn to Charlaine Harris’ Southern vampire series, with its Louisiana locale. None of the urban fantasy writers I have lately been reading are stylists of Burke’s caliber. I would rather read, perhaps, any tale set in the NOLA environs than a lyrical story set in Montana. This set me thinking about the role of place in the urban fantasy genre in particular and in compelling writing in general.

Ilona Andrews’ heroine inhabits a parallel Atlanta, a city I know a little after six years at the University of Georgia in nearby Athens. Harry Dresden inhabits Chicago, a city I’ve visited twice for conventions, backdrop for the V.I. Warshawski mysteries and sometimes seen in films. Kate Morgan, Kim Harrison’s witch, lives in Cleveland. Any of these places could be named Anywhere, USA, for all that sense of place matters. They are cities, concrete wastelands that look gray even on a sunny day. Character and plot hold my attention in these stories, not sense of place.

How important is place for a well-told tale? In the hands of a master word slinger, place is another character permeating every action with its history. Could Casablanca happen anywhere else but in the exotic locate of wartime Morocco? No other city but New Orleans has a street or A Streetcar Named Desire, the pulsing sense of place that throbs throughout Tennessee Williams play. The seething undercurrents of race and sex of the old South collide with the weather to create an explosive brew in Williams’ The Long Hot Summer. Weather and place also catalyze the drama of the film Key Largo.

Joshua Meyerowitz wrote an important book of media analysis, No Sense of Place. He persuasively argued that television had dissolved social norms between on-stage and back-stage. We have the outworking of this theory in the current craze for reality TV and the plague of social networking, in which nothing is too personal to be made public.

Me, I embrace a sense of place. I love where I live, and I am clinging stubbornly to this toehold in the sun despite the harsh economic climate. I escape into worlds of urban fantasy in which demons are no less dangerous but contained with charms and incantations, circles of salt, blood rituals, and alliances with creates that never were. These are other worlds with a verisimilitude to my own but different enough that it is the world of fantastical beings and events that captures my attention, not details of the cityscape. Harris’s Louisiana alone stands out as distinct. I hope that James Lee Burke bring Robicheaux back to Iberia parish and all things Louisiana.

Jim Butcher's Dresden Files:Inventive Urban Fantasy

Harry Dresden is a wizard, the only practicing wizard-private eye in Chicago. Of indeterminate age but most likely in his 30s, Dresden is a hero in the wise-cracking, tough-guy tradition of Sam Spade and the other film noir private eyes. Butcher packs each book with rollicking action, plot twists, and ensemble characters. Working with the Special Investigations team of the Chicago Police Department, Dresden is their consultant for the scary things that go bump in the night and that people prefer not to believe are real.

In the series opener, Storm Front, Dresden battles a black magician. Lieutenant Kerrin Murphy heads up the Special Investigations team. She is embattled not only by the black magic murderer but by police politics; there are those in high places who consider her work unnecessary.

The adversaries of Dresden and Murphy include giant scorpions, a demon, and a power-mad black practitioner who rips the hearts from victims while not even being present. Dresden triumphs, just barely, with potions, power objects, and occasional gunfire.

Fool Moon introduces a pack of werewolves who channel their magical powers for good. He and Murphy barely escape from the bad werewolves; it would spoil the suspense to say who’s who. Dresden also comes by an attractive love interest.

Most of the series, which stops numbering the novels after nine, is available at one library or another in my area. The vagaries of availability led me to move on to the fourth book, Summer Knight. Enough of the third book, Grave Peril, is filled in so that I can make sense of what went before without knowing so much I no longer want to read it. In short, Butcher does a good job of allowing each book to stand alone.

Charlaine Harris’s Southern vampire series remains my favorite in the urban fantasy genre. Sookie Stackhouse is a nice Southern gal, the vampires come preciously close to being human in their motivations and comport, and gore is minimized. All in all, this series is endearing.

Lori Handeland’s werewolf/nightcreatures series is heavy-handed on eroticism. She seems to be evolving in both character development and plot twists.

Kelly McCullough’s webmage series, with three books so far, is closest in tone to the Dresden files. Both feature magical heroes – one human, one nearly immortal. Both pack guns, are rebellious smart-mouths, chivalrous, clever, and honorable. One channels his magical energy through the computer web; the other blows out computers and most other forms of technology when near them.

Kate Daniels is a feminine counterpart to Harry Dresden. Magic Bites is the first entry in Ilona Andrews’s promising series. Daniels is another freelancer magic worker who polices evil mayhem at the boundary between technical reality and sorcery. Andrews’ vampires are much different than those in the world created by Harris. They are mostly mindless, blood-thirsty and evil; they are compared to cockroaches. Wizards can animate the vampires' bodies for their own, usually nefarious, purposes. There’s great potential in a romance developing between a were-lion, king of the shape shifters, and Kate. Magic Burns is the second Kate Daniels’ book.

In summary, the Dresden files are fast-paced, entertaining books in which Jim Butcher creates a magical world ruled by its own laws. Harry Dresden is an appealing and entertaining hero in the ever-growing pantheon of urban fantasy novels.

Handeland's Rising Moon and Hidden MoonAre Top Entries in Nightcreatures Series

Lori Handeland hits her stride in the last three volumes of her eight-book Nighcreatures werewolf series. The plots of Rising Moon and Hidden Moon have surprising twists, and it’s pretty hard to fool this lifelong bookworm. I don’t want to be a spoiler, so let me give an overview of the novels in order.

One thread that unites the books is the recurring presence of a mysterious secret government agency, the Jager-Suchers or werewolf hunter-searchers. A minor character in one book may emerge as the protagonist in another. These books follow the pattern of romance novels, with distracting sex scenes that contribute little to character development or plot. Handeland, nonetheless, creates an interesting multi-faceted world in these novels.

The series opens with Blue Moon and weird goings-on at a Wisconsin summer resort. Police officer Jesse McQuade and a native American professor Will Cadotte unravel the mystery. Edward Mandanauer, driving force behind the Jager-Suchers, arrives early, armed to the teeth with silver bullets in bandoliers slung across his bony chest. Jesse gets her guy; the werewolves get dead.

Leigh Tyler, a talented werewolf slayer, is the protagonist of Hunter’s Moon. The action moves to Wisconsin. Helped by Jesse, Will, and Mandenauer, Leigh becomes involved with the first good werewolf we meet in the series. Readers are introduced to Dr. Elise Hanover whose own werewolf adventure and love story is the subject of Dark Moon, third book in the series. Mandanauer’s own dark past is revealed in that tale.

Crescent Moon strikes off in a new direction. Diane Malone, a cryptozoologist, is hired to investigate suspicious disappearances in a bayou outside of New Orleans. Her sleuthing uncovers the family curse of the Ruelles and leads her into the arms of another rugged hero in the series, Ruelle scion Adam. Edward Mandanauer and Dr. Elise Hanover emerge like deus ex machina toward the end of the story.

Midnight Moon takes a minor character in Crescent Moon, voodoo priestess Cassandra, to Haiti. The nightcreatures theme broadens to include zombies and other shapeshifters besides werewolves. Devon Murphy, the love interest, is Indiana Jones with Captain Jack Sparrow beads and feathers in his hair. The Jager-Suchers and Edward Mandanauer are but a shadowy group pulling the strings off-stage.

Things really get interesting in Rising Moon, one of my favorites in the series. The action returns to the Big Easy. Private eye Anne Lockheart comes to New Orleans looking for her missing sister, meets mysterious blind jazz musician John Rodolfo, and the story goes from there. Cassandra and Devon, Diane and Adam, Mandanauer and Elise are on hand for the surprising denouement. The story also is appealing because the theme of redemption emerges with strength for the first time since weakly broached in Hunter’s Moon.

Hidden Moon takes readers to Georgia. Claire Kennedy, small-town mayor, is confronted with inexplicable happenings when a band of gypsies arrive. An element of sorcery emerges in the figure of love interest Malachi Cartwright. The theme of redemption is linked with that of love in a poignant climax (in more ways than one). Mandanauer and Elise Hanover make cameo appearances.

Finally, Thunder Moon returns to Lake Bluff, Georgia, and the theme of Native American mysticism that plays a key role in the plots of Blue Moon (book one) and Hunter’s Moon (three). Grace McDaniel, Lake Bluff sheriff, full-blooded Cherokee, and childhood friend of mayor Claire Kennedy, had a large supporting role in Hidden Moon. Now, her romance with Ian Walker, physician, Native American healer and warrior, continues to move the series away from werewolves into other permutations of shapeshifting and sorcery. Walker is revealed as a member of a Native-American society of monster hunters. The Jager-Suchers play little part and go underground, according to an epilogue.

It’s unclear whether Handeland will continue the series. The preview chapter of Any Given Doomsday does not suggest continuance of the moon-themed series. Yet Handeland leaves the door open.

To purchase all eight novels, please see my listing on ebay through Dec. 19.

WebMage by Kelly McCulloughIs Unique SciFi-Fantasy Romp

Kelly McCullough’s first novel, WebMage, cooks up a compelling dish of science fiction and fantasy, with a dash of romance. The recipe might look something like this:

Break off parts of William Gibson’s Neuromancer series, especially episodes about jacking into cyberspace and solving code mysteries. Crumble coarsely. Set aside.

Create a thick stew of spells, goblins, dragons, faeries, trolls, castles and warriors. I like the Harry Potter series for this purpose. Beat in some Greek mythos from Edith Hamilton and Bullfinch. Mix all ingredients thoroughly. Season with wisecracks from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Bake for several hours.

The story posits web links where the world of the Greek Immortals overlaps that of geek mortals. For those of us who grew up when making a copy meant pounding out a document in carbon triplicate on an upright typewriter, praying that we’d make no typographical keystroke mistakes that could not be fixed with WhiteOut, the world that computers bring to our fingertips makes coding pretty darn close to magical spell casting anyway. So it’s a short leap to blend cyberspace with the Olympian space occupied by the gods and goddesses of ancient mythology. This is especially true if one had to take two semesters in ancient culture, as did I.

The plot concerns a fight for free will for humans and their webgoblin companions, as Eris, goddess of discord, battles the Fates, guardians of order, one of whom happens to be our hero’s great-great into ancient time grandmother. Our hero, Ravirn, experiences a value and identity transformation in the endlessly changing cosmos of chaos-verses-order. This may sound like a task for a brooding, romantic hero. Ravirn is more like a film noir detective, a man (figuratively speaking, for he is not human) of action, ready for anything, a quip on his lips while facing down death.

His is not the film noir world in which right and wrong are hard to distinguish admidst moody shades of gray. Rather, our web sorcerer’s reality is the brightly colored light dance of our times, in which colors and images flicker before his eyes in a dizzying and sometimes confusing array of cross-cutting. Truth, right and wrong, are still hard to discern as impregnable values.

WebMage popped off the library shelves as I was looking for a entirely different book by another author -- a happy happenstance. As it turned out, the other book was not to my taste, and I am returning it mostly unread. Not all fantasy worlds are created equal, and Cheyennne McCray’s witchy series includes S&M and too much predictable sex for my taste. If you have a taste for cyberpunk fiction or sword-and-myth fantasy, WebMage may be for you.

Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire BooksBeat Handeland's Werewolf Nightcreatures

Lori Handeland has my respect as author; anyone who can make a living turning out novel after novel deserves accolades. This isn’t about trashing a penwoman. Rather, it’s an investigation into why I find one fictional world compelling and the other boring.

I am so enthralled by the world Harris creates in her Sookie Stackhouse novels (source of the HBO Trueblood series) that I became concerned about polishing off the eight novels too quickly. I can tear through a typical airport novel in a day. Handeland’s werewolf series earned many complimentary reviews on amazon.com. I purchased the Nightcreature novels as a set on ebay.

I have finished the first four novels in each series. Here’s five reasons why I love the world Harris has created.

Harris creates interesting, appealing multi-dimensional characters.

Heroine Sookie Stackhouse is so unique that 150-year-old vampire Bill Compton asks her several times, “What are you?” Sookie is a small-town waitress, psychic, and brave, but she has off-days like anyone else. I may be 35 years older than Sookie, but I can relate to her concerns, such as how to afford gravel for the driveway or a new coat to replace one splattered with the brains of a shapeshifter who tried to kill her.

The vampires are a mix of evil and good, like humans. I can move almost seamlessly from my world into the one Harris has creates for Sookie and her herd. Each Handeland heroine, on the other hand, has two interests: killing werewolves and having great sex with the guy in her life. Handeland also created a writing conundrum for herself by writing in the voice of a new heroine in each book. Handeland gets around the similarity in voice of the first two protagonists by playing it up. They become best friends. The third book was so by-the-numbers that I finished it in three hours while standing in line to vote, skipping over anything that made me yawn.

The Southern vampire stories are lightened with humor.

Sookie Stackhouse is a kind-hearted misfit. She tends to think charitably of those around her, living, dead, or supernatural. Her humor is more often self-deprecating than unkind to others. Handeland’s gals are tough, alienated, and often bitter. The humor often denigrates others and, most of the time, I don’t find what I am told are humorous asides particularly funny.

The Southern vampire plots are full of surprises.

In the course of four novels, Sookie has (not necessarily in this order) single-handedly foiled vampire drainers, exposed a vampire embezzler, broken up an evangelical group that burns vampires, traveled to Mississippi with a werewolf, hidden a vampire sheriff who has lost his memory from evil witches, participated in several bloodbaths, rescued her lover vampire Bill from being tortured, and become a valued friend of a pack of werewolves and a family of shapeshifter panthers.

Handeland’s heroines have killed werewolves and had sex. Once a Handeland heroine has a good lay, she is hooked forever on the guy. It does not matter if he’s a werewolf or the devil himself, she is in l-o-v-e.

Sookie Stackhouse is not ruled by sexual desire.

It’s tempting to dismiss the sexual obsession of Handeland’s heroines as the follies and hormones of youth. Sookie is young, too, and she is not ruled by her glands. Sookie rescues vampire Bill from his former lover, but she does not return to his arms. Sookie has something going on above the waist.

Sookie’s unexpected affair with vampire Eric, when he loses his memory and becomes uncharacteristically sweet, was inspired. Sookie quickly reject continuing the liaison when Eric returns to being his arrogant, confident, demanding self.

Handeland novels have the typical romance-novel plot: hunky hero, an obstacle that makes the heroine doubt him but not so much that she does not continue to fall into bed with him every time she's near him.

Harris treats sex scenes with a light touch.

Romance novels that started out with purple prose in the 70s have evolved to soft-core pornography. Aching loins. Swollen throbbing manhood. Got it. I don’t need five or six pages of details, thanks anyway Lori. I prefer my porn hard core. By the time I got to Crescent Moon, fourth Nightcreatures novel, the characters and sex was so predictable that I skipped the center, turned to the denouement, and wrapped up the novel in under an hour.

In summary, my unread Charlaine Harris Southern vampire novels are tucked away, a special treat to be anticipated and savored. Appealing characters, original plots, a touch of humor and tasteful sex make this series a winning combination.

Sookie Stackhouse, Charlaine Harris & Her Southern Vampire Series, HBO's Trueblood and Literary Space

I took most of the day off from work and entered what Ruth L. Hubbard called “literary space” in a 1969 research article. My territory was the world created by Charlaine Harris in her Southern Vampire series, which is receiving vast public attention since used as the basis for the HBO series Trueblood.

Sookie Stackhouse is the hero of this compelling world, which occupies a small corner of northern Louisiana. The tall, dark, handsome love interest in the first novel, Dead Until Dark, is the vampire Bill, who just happens to be dead – until dark.

I entered this steamy world from about 10 p.m. last night until 1 this afternoon, with some time out for sleep. The experience of so fully entering a fictional world that blots out the here-and-now reality set me to thinking about what makes the experience of watching the TV serial qualitatively different from reading the book.

Hubbard’s article (Inner Designs in Language Arts, volume 66) has shaped my thinking about the experience of reading long past the influence normally held by academic research. Hubbard interviewed seven- and nine-year-olds with open-ended questions. She found that children, like adults, enter into what she calls "literary space," defined as that mental area in which the story events feel as if they are happening to you even though you know they're not. It is a state of mind in which the distinction between oneself and the story blurs. It is characterized by complete concentration on the book that blocks out attention to the outside world, and the sense that what happens in the story "fells like" it is happening to you.

Obviously, I am influenced by my experience watching Trueblood, because a month ago I didn’t know who Charlaine Harris was. Now, I’ve read the first book and avidly await the arrival of the next four.

One way that the books are different from watching TV is that I can enter the literary space of the novels and occupy it for hours and hours.

I also enjoy imagining the characters, instead of seeing the writers' and directors' visual interpretations. Anna Paquin’s Sookie structured my imaginary Sookie, but my vampire Bill is as much influenced by Anne Rice’s Lestat as actor Stephen Moyer.

Rice’s vampire world became overly convoluted in Queen of the Damned and her writing overwrought. Tale of the Body Thief redeemed her quartet of Vampire Chronicles. Down-to-earth Sookie Stackhouse’s common sense will, hopefully, be a counterweight to Harris going in that direction. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to my next escape into the literary space that Harris has created.