Caden O'Brien's Website

What would real people do if they suddenly found themselves turned into vampires or other supernatural beings? Or if they met one of these beings in the course or ordinary or extraordinary events? Ever since I was a kid, I thought “I know these things don’t exist, but what if…?” I like to think of myself as somewhat grounded in reality, but I also have that “but what if” question in the back of my mind. I just really want to believe I guess.

My favorite books tend to be those that walk the edge of fantasy and reality. They deal with ordinary people in the ordinary world, but there’s a twist. Magical and supernatural elements abide alongside the mundane world. You might be an ordinary 9-to-5 person with no special talents, but your boss is a vampire. Or a werewolf pack lives on the edge of town and they run all the security and law enforcement operations. Or the evil government took special forces soldiers, and experimented on them until a variety of psychic talents were enhanced. Having things like this in your life can have a dramatic impact! The stories focus on real people dealing with extraordinary things, and they react much like you or I would do. The fantasy is realistic.

Jeri Smith-Ready does a fabulous job in blending the real with the supernatural. I’ve just read the first two books in her WVMP Series, Wicked Game and Bad to the Bone.

Here’s the storyline from the author’s website:

Recovering con artist Ciara Griffin is trying to live the straight life, even if it means finding a (shudder!) real job. She takes an internship at a local radio station, whose late-night time-warp format features 1940s blues, 60s psychedelia, 80s Goth, and more, all with an uncannily authentic flair. Ciara soon discovers how the DJs maintain their cred: they’re vampires, stuck forever in the eras in which they were turned.

Ciara’s first instinct, as always, is to cut and run. But communications giant Skywave wants to buy WVMP and turn it into just another hit-playing clone. Without the station—and the link it provides to their original Life Times—the vampires would “fade,” becoming little more than mindless ghosts of the past. Suddenly a routine corporate takeover becomes a matter of life and un-death.

Ciara is a tough gal. Twenty-four years old and trying to make it in the legit world by getting a college degree, she was raised by grifter parents who moved every two weeks. Relationships, honesty, and commitment are not part of her psyche. She’s got a dead-eyed cynical view of the world and its inhabitants, supernatural or not. Told from her viewpoint, she is foul-mouthed and funny, and I found myself laughing out loud at many of the situations she found herself in. For example, her first intimate encounter with future-love-interest Shane (a young grunge-era vampire) resulted in him taking a huge chomp out of her thigh, which caused her to viciously kick him in the head with her other leg. His resulting jerk-back causes a lot of flesh-ripping which causes a lot of bleeding, which requires stitches… Shane runs off into the night. Now, in a typical romance book, the assault would have caused her multiple orgasms and an instant bonding to her attacker, who would nobly turn her into a vampire so that they could have mind-blowing sex for eternity. But this isn’t fairy-tale land.

Smith-Ready’s worldbuilding is superb. She poses a unique view of vampire life, and it’s not happy-camperland for the vamps. Yes, they are beautiful, alluring, super-strong, super-fast, and super-sexual. But something bad starts happening after they are created, and it just gets worse as they age: they fade. Over time they become less human, while at the same time the vampiric traits get stronger. If they lose their connection to their Life Time, fading is even faster because they have difficulty connecting to the present time. They can’t learn new things or form real relationships. The world is so confusing to them, they develop obsessive/compulsive behaviors to try to cope with things they can’t control. They become extremely flammable, and they burn like paper (humans burn like wood). Even though they’re technically immortal, the average vamp only lives about 80 years after their turning. It’s heart-rending to see them struggle.

At first Ciara wants nothing to do with these freaks, but because she’s a good person at heart (and she really needs the job) she throws her lot in with the vamps and cooks up a scam, er, plan, to save the radio station and the sanctuary it provides the vamps. She re-brands the station as “The Life-blood of Rock n Roll” and promotes the Vampire DJ angle. Almost no-one believes they’re real, of course, but the campaign is a huge success. Her relationship with Shane is rocky – he’s young enough to be still quite human and he loves her, but she’s afraid of it. As they work through the difficulties, they have the inevitable fading problem hanging over their heads, except they don’t know how fast it will happen or whether Ciara’s efforts to save Shane will help avoid it. In spite of these unique problems, their relationship is like any other couple getting off to a tough start. It’s believable, and because we care about the characters, it pulls at the heartstrings.

The bad guys work hard to destroy the vamps and Ciara too, and there’s good action in both books. These are not strictly romance books, so there’s more character development and action to move the plot along. These books are on my keeper shelf and I can’t wait for the third installment, Bring On The Night, which will be out in August 2010.

Smith-Ready is an obvious musicphile, and the book comes with a lot of playlists of the tunes the DJ’s play. Her website includes a great music player with all the tunes from the books on it, and I was thrilled at how many of them were in my personal library. I also found a lot of tracks that I haven’t heard in years, so I happily added them to my collection.  Great stories and good music totally do it for me. If you also like books and music, check out Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville series. She’s a DJ werewolf, and the books are also realistic fantasy. Rock on!

• Wicked Game
• Bad to the Bone
• Bring on the Night (August 2010)
• tentatively titled Lust for Life (early Spring 2011)

Just imagine that when you were five years old, your parents were horribly killed in a car accident, and you were left alone all night by their bloodied bodies until help arrived the next day. Imagine the horrors you lived with as you were shunted from one foster home to another, as your nightmares and screaming ensured that you never had a stable home. Imagine that eventually you were molested by deviant foster parents who took advantage of your trauma.  You grew up fast and tough, and fortunately saw a way out of your hell by getting the best education you could so that you could control your own destiny.

You are in college and meet the man of your dreams, who seems to know what you’ve suffered and loves you in spite of your prickly nature. You become engaged, and travel with him to meet his father. While there, imagine that your fiance turns into a werewolf and bites you…

That’s the premise behind Kelley Armstrong’s first book, Bitten, published in 2001. It’s a different take on the popular werewolf theme, one that grounds it in reality. The book is narrated by Elena Michaels, 10 years after her unwilling conversion to werewolf status by her werewolf fiance Clayton Danvers. She is the only female werewolf in existence, and she has been tormented with rage, insanity, and confusion as she lived with Clay and his father Jeremy, who is the alpha of the small werewolf community in upstate New York. While she mostly adjusts to her changed life, she longs to return to Toronto and finish college, and seize the life she had dreamed of during her childhood.

Things are complicated because she zig zags between deep love and towering rage for her mate Clay.  He loves her unwaveringly, even after she leaves him to go back to Canada. The book opens with her in a new life living with a new man in Toronto, when Jeremy contacts her asking her to return to help deal with a pack emergency. She returns reluctantly, planning to be gone no more than a few days.

Elena is tough, smart, and witty as hell. Armstrong has done an outstanding job of  creating characters that are very believable as wolves in people bodies. Many werewolf stories just have them turning furry once a month, but otherwise they think and behave just as humans do. Clay, Elena, and Jeremy (and the other werewolves) are quite different, and you see that clearly in the way Elena thinks.

Clay in particular is very “wolfie” – there is nothing human in the way he reacts to people and their affairs, the way he is quick to kill anyone who threatens his Alpha and his pack, and in the way he loves Elena. He is drop-dead gorgeous as well as brilliant, and has a PhD in anthropology. You can’t help but love him while at the same time wondering what it would really be like to live with him…

Jeremy is also the product of a tortured childhood, having been raised by his psychotic and sadistic werewolf father. He grew up with a deep sense of responsibility, giving up his dreams in order to take care of his family, his adopted son Clay, and eventually the pack who made him Alpha.

I wouldn’t call this a paranormal romance, as those tend to be “fluffier” in tone and content. And lots of hot sex tends to dominate the romance genre. Bitten is more of a paranormal thriller (or realistic fantasy, or urban paranormal…), whereby the 3 main characters have to defeat the “mutts” – non-pack werewolves who threaten the pack’s lives and territory. The conflict is bloody and violent, with no remorse shown for eliminating the threat. Good guys die too, at the hands and jaws of the mutts.

Under this storyline, Clay and Elena struggle with their relationship. Clay makes no secret of the fact that Elena is the only woman for him and he wants her to stay. But he doesn’t try to force her, and she is torn between her attraction and love for Clay and the new life that she’s got a toehold in. The conflict is realistically portrayed and fascinating. There is an underlying sad note of dreams given up because of actions of another,while at the same time offering a life and love that is immensely satisfying. Just as in the real world, there may not be a candy-coated happy ending for everyone. Life is indeed what you make of it.

There’s plenty of sizzle between Clay and Elena and I loved every scene that they have.  Thankfully, Armstrong doesn’t rely on cliched phrases and euphemisms for body parts or sex acts, nor does she flood the book with steamy but gratuitous sex scenes. The encounters are integral to the plot and are well placed. I’m totally in love with Clay, even if he IS an unsociable bastard!

The Women of the Otherworld consists of (at present) 10 books, several of them with the werewolves and Elena featured. The second book on the series, Stolen, picks up where Bitten leaves off. Here, Elena is kidnapped by a psycho billionaire who is collecting other-worlders in order to steal their powers. We meet other characters – witches, demons, vampires – that in turn have their own books in the series. Elena returns as narrator in book 6, Broken, and again in book 10, Frostbitten .  A book I LOVED in this series is Men of the Otherworld,  which has the stories of Jeremy and Clayton as well as some of the other men.  The guys are to die for!

If you’re a fan of paranormals but hate the cheesy stuff, give this series a try, particularly the werewolf books. I haven’t read all of  the others yet, but I love Armstrong’s writing and will pick them up when I finish with Frostbitten. Enjoy!