The Literate Kitty

The next time you’re having an especially crappy day at work, remind yourself that things could always be worse. You could , for instance, be doing something like toiling away in a meat processing plant (shudder) or mucking about in a sewage treatment facility (cringe)... or, you could be earning a meager income as a demon-slayer-for-hire, valiantly battling all the ooky, creepy, dangerous creatures from the underworld every night, while most people (like you and I) are slumbering comfortably in their beds.  See? Things really could be worse... as they are for Victory “Vicky” Vaughn, who continues trying to rid Boston’s residents of their pesky personal demons (with creepily corporeal forms), in the latest installment of Nancy Holzner’s consistently-entertaining “Deadtown” series, Darklands . ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ Not much has changed in Deadtown--the quarantined section of Boston which all of the city’s inhuman (supernatural) and undead (zombie) residents are forced t...

There aren’t many constants out there in the world, but one which seems to always hold true is that all of us will never really, truly , get along with each other. Pessimistic, you say? Okay, fine... guilty as charged. Still, history argues pretty persuasively against the likelihood of any sort of widespread, lasting peace. From the days when cavemen stomped the Earth--when the males battled each other with clubs over who got the biggest hunk of meat from a hunt (survival), or got to claim the healthiest cavewoman (both survival and power), to today--when we still fight over survival and power, plus a whole mess of other things, we’ve proven ourselves to be quite the warmongering species. So, just imagine what life on Terra Firma would be like if we threw zombies, vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, etc., into the mix. (One big party? Um, yeah, not so much.) Last year we were introduced to just such a mix in Nancy Holzner’s Urban Fantasy Deadtown , the title of which refers to the spe...

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past several years, you’re no doubt aware that Urban Fantasy fiction has virtually exploded during that time, in terms of both popularity and the number of new releases. That doesn’t mean it’s some newfangled genre, however; the fact is that there has always been a certain segment of readers devoted to the macabre, the mystical, the mythical, and the magical--and an assortment of writers more than willing to cater to such devotion.  For those of us who like to dream of a different place—not necessarily better, mind you, just different than where we are right now—UF offers a chance to escape, to explore new worlds and new realities... while retaining at least some semblance to the world in which we live. New-to-the-genre Nancy Holzner’s Deadtown is an example of one of the best new UF series out there. Deadtown is set in Boston, in an uneasy world in which supernatural creatures are "out"... but not really trusted or respected...