For New York Times best-selling author Carrie Vaughn, the road trip to promote the recent back-to-back releases of the fifth and sixth adventures of her DJ-turned-werewolf Kitty, KITTY AND THE DEAD MAN’S HAND and KITTY RAISES HELL, is near its end. At an Albuquerque bookstore visit, Vaughn sits down with Fango to discuss what’s next for Kitty Norville.
In KITTY RAISES HELL, Vaughn’s alpha female werewolf returns home to Denver from Las Vegas after eloping, only to find that not all that happens in Sin City stays there. “The trouble she found in Vegas follows her back to Denver, and it’s a supernatural threat she has never encountered before,” says the Colorado-based author. “She calls on a team of TV paranormal investigators to help her figure out what’s going on and how to stop it. The book also introduces a new villain.”
The idea of a future collection of Kitty short tales is also a possibility. “I use the stories to explore ideas and situations I don’t have room for in the books. The best example is ‘Looking After Family,’ which appeared in Realms of Fantasy years ago. It’s the backstory of Ben [Kitty’s husband] and Cormac [the bounty hunter]. In order to work on KITTY GOES TO WASHINGTON and KITTY TAKES A HOLIDAY, I needed a clear picture of where those two characters came from and about their relationship. The story was a great way to do that.”
It’s a good time for werewolves, between the works of authors Patricia Briggs, Carole Nelson Douglas and Vaughn, and the upcoming release of Universal’s THE WOLFMAN. Despite Time magazine recently opining that zombies may be the new vampires, might the same be said about lycanthropes?
“I don’t think anything will really displace vampires in popularity,” Vaughn says. “Too many people love them. But some have discovered that werewolves can be just as interesting, and have given people a chance to write and read different kinds of stories.”
In the Kitty universe, werewolves and vampires have jobs, mingle with regular folks and are just starting to reveal themselves (helped by Kitty’s forced transformation on TV in KITTY GOES TO WASHINGTON). The first book opens with Kitty already bitten, and deciding to change her late-night DJ slot into a call-in show for supernatural beings. “There has always been supernatural fiction that gets hung up on soap-opera relationship issues, especially when it takes place in the ‘real’ world,” Vaughn notes. “Imagine Lestat calling in to Dr. Phil about his relationship problems. I decided that if there are supernatural creatures in the real world, they’d need their own advice show. I didn’t want to write about vampires, so I made my host a werewolf. And I couldn’t not call her Kitty.”
Vaughn knows it is often hard to categorize her books: “I’ve called them ‘light horror.’ They’re upbeat dark fantasy. The model I use is AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, which is both funny and horrific, and has lots going on besides the scary elements. I’m not sure ‘urban fantasy’ is all that descriptive, since people use it to mean different things. The Kitty books really are dark fantasy/horror crossovers. But they tend to defy genre descriptions because they cover so much ground. They have mystery, action/adventure, romance and so on. I hear from people that they pick up the books expecting one thing—standard supernatural romance—and they get something different.”
Vaughn adds that the forthcoming KITTY’S HOUSE OF HORRORS will be the darkest volume to date. “It has some of the scariest, creepiest scenes I’ve ever written,” she says. “It definitely has horrific moments. I tend to see horror as a tone rather than a specific genre. It’s a tool I can use to scare people, when that’s appropriate for the story. One thing I definitely want to avoid is sugarcoating some of the tropes of vampires and werewolves.”
The appeal of Kitty, Vaughn says, is to keep her as just a regular woman. “She’s an ordinary person coping with extraordinary circumstances,” the author says. “I have no intention of turning her into some kind of chosen supernatural warrior. What I hear most from readers is that Kitty seems like someone they know, someone they could be friends with. I jokingly tell people my books have as much in common with BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY as they do with THE HOWLING.”
