The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher

I’d always wanted to do a complete reread of Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy series The Dresden Files. 

Part of the problem was that I wanted to wait until the final volume was due out, and while Butcher’s put the estimate at 20 books, he isn’t firm on that and considering that the 15^th book in the series (Skin Game) came out in 2014 and there’s still no release date for book 16, I felt that this wasn’t going to conclude any time soon. I did want to do finished series for this reread, but I don’t have many B authors to do and as the Dresdens tend to be relatively self contained (one obvious exception being book 12 Changes and it’s followup Ghost Story) I figured I could break that rule here, and mind you it’s unlikely to be the last time I’ll break it, either.

Rather than being a book by book review of the 15 published novels and the 2 short story collections this is more of an overview of the series and to a certain extent it’s impact on the sub genre of urban fantasy.

I don’t think it’s stretching things too much to describe The Dresden Files as a game changer for urban fantasy. Prior to the appearance of Storm Front (the first book in the series) the genre that people were starting to call urban fantasy tended to be dominated by the likes of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series and Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries. Now Anita Blake tends to be thought of as paranormal romance, or as some people refer to it vampire porn, and Charlaine Harris has always thought of the Sookie Stackhouse’s as southern gothic with supernatural elements. Both also feature sex fairly prominently.

Dresden was different. Harry is a wizard for hire, he even advertises in the phone book. While he’s a wizard, he’s more Phillip Marlowe than Merlin. The conceit made was that he was as much a hard boiled private eye as he was a wizard. He did much the same work as a PI, he just used magic to get the job done a lot of the time. The books, especially the early ones, do have a very noirish feel to them. The feel is continued by Butcher deciding to set the books in and around Chicago. He also makes the setting feel older than it should, by giving a side effect to Harry’s use of magic, it also affects most magic users, use of the power tends to foul up complex machinery, mostly anything invented post WW II. It creates some interesting obstacles for Harry and gives him a reliance on his ever growing list of allies.

Two other points of difference were the fact that while creatures such as vampires and werewolves do exist, their existence is not common knowledge as it is in the Anita Blakes and the Sookie Stackhouses. The other was the lack of sex. Harry’s not a monk, and he does have sex, but it never becomes a focus of the story the way it did in other works. To my count by book 15 he’s had 4 significant romantic connections; his adolescent crush Elaine, the reporter Susan Rodrigues, Karrin Murphy and Anastasia Luccio, and he didn’t sleep with them all.

The first few books were very standalone, and they began the work of introducing and setting up Harry’s support crew, and his list of enemies and frenemies. Some of these form what I feel are the best and most multi layered of the characters (‘Gentleman’ John Marcone and the Leanan Sidhe are two that spring to mind).

Reading them back to back as I did, and it took me the better part of the last 5 months, gave me a fairly good insight into how Jim Butcher developed as a writer, although it has to be said that his characters are largely a case of what you see is what you get. They pretty much remain as they first appear in the books. They do go through some changes depending on their situations, but essentially they’re still the same internally as when the readers first encounter them.

The early books were a little formulaic, Storm Front concerned itself mostly with an evil sorcerer, although it established that a staple of urban fantasy; vampires, were significant players in Harry’s world. The second book Fool Moon introduced werewolves and with book 3 a religious element entered the series when the Holy Knight of the Sword Michael Carpenter made his first appearance. I always liked Michael as a character and his large family, I never guessed how important his pre adolescent daughter; Molly, would become at that time, though, which is a clue to how while the stories have always been firmly rooted in the urban fantasy genre, they’ve become more like a high fantasy epic in scope.

Over the first few books Butcher set up his world and introduced his characters. The first five or so books were quite episodic and this was probably because before that the writers deal with the publisher hadn’t looked that many books ahead. By book 5 there was a significant amount of public interest. Each volume wound up high on the best seller list, the author had a hardback deal and later on there was even a regrettably short lived TV show.

Around book 5 or 6 the major cast of characters had all been introduced. Mainstays like Harry himself, Karrin Murphy and Bob the Skull were always there, and other peripherals came and went: Bill Borden and his pack of werewolves, the fairy warrior Toot Toot, Thomas the White Court vampire, Michael Carpenter and his family, Susan Rodrigues. Ebenezar McCoy and Waldo Butters the polka loving medical examiner. There were also Harry’s animal companions, Mister the cat and Mouse the dog, who turns out to be much more than he originally seems. There were others like Mac the bartender, Father Forthill, Kincaid and Ivy.

That was where I think Butcher decided how big this was going to be and the series arc seemed to be set from book 7 on. They’ve remained quite self contained, except for Changes and Ghost Story, but have become harder and harder to pick one up and read it without feeling as a reader that there’s a fair bit of story unread.

Since The Dresden Files made it’s appearance with Storm Front and succeeded spectacularly, it’s opened up the genre and moved more into a detective style of fiction rather than the more paranormal romance side of things, where the relationships are the focus rather than the plot.

In the past I’ve described the Dresdens as the literary equivalent of fast food. They’re attractive and easy to digest once in a while, but a steady diet of them would ultimately do the reader more harm than good. I still stand by that, and after largely shot gunning the entire 15 novels followed by the 2 short story collections that’s only firmed the opinion. I did enjoy it, but it wouldn’t be something I’d want to do again in a hurry.

When I read the second short story collection: Brief Cases, for the first time last year I tore through it and my overwhelming feeling was that it was great to read about Harry and Co again. Kind of like spending time with a friend I hadn’t seen for a while. Part of that was because I do enjoy the books and part of it was that the 15^th book; Skin Game came out in 2014 and readers haven’t had another Harry Dresden since, although book 16 is promised.

15 novels and the better part of 20 years is quite an achievement and I think it’s not only a testament to the sheer readability of Butcher’s writing, he’s no prose stylist, but he is easy to read, he has a lot of what author and critic Jo Walton once described as ‘I want to read itosity’. There are also the characters. The cast is diverse from all sorts of backgrounds and they’re quite relatable to the majority of Butcher’s readers.

The books like their major character rose from humble and unlikely beginnings to become quite powerful and much talked about. When people in the books mention wizard, everyone knows that they’re talking about Harry, and now when readers mention the words urban fantasy, Harry Dresden is often the first name of plenty of people’s lips.

I’ve already started the C’s, but you’ll need to wait for a bit to find out who it is, I promise it won’t take this long or be this big.

The Great Reread Project Mark III - The Letter B

It was strangely hard to find a book authored by an author starting with the letter B. I guess we don't have that many I want to read over and over. I'd read Clive Barker's Imajica and Holly Black's Tithe in the previous rereads. So this time I was a bit of a quandary.

In the end I decided to go with a favourite author and a favourite series in the first of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. I am aware that's not the current cover. It is however the cover that my edition has, and I also prefer it to the newer ones. I have nothing against Chris McGrath as a cover artist, but I just prefer the earlier Dresden Files covers.

Picking the opening book of a long running unfinished series gave me a few more questions to ask. Should I just read the first one, or go ahead and reread the whole 15 published so far. As the Dresden Files books are fairly episodic and self contained I decided that reading the first one only would be okay (I will reread the whole thing one day, but probably wait until the penultimate volume comes out).

I think Storm Front may get a bit of bum rap from readers. Fans now claim that Storm Front really isn't that good and the series doesn't take off until the 3rd book. This may stem from the fact that it's the first book and it was written 16 years ago now. It hasn't dated badly, but there are things in it that do make it come across more as a product of its time.

When Butcher first wrote the books he had the idea to make his hero come across as a hard boiled private eye type, that's probably why he chose Chicago as his setting. He does a pretty good job of channeling Raymond Chandler in this one, the books do move further away from that style as the story unfolds, though.

It is true that in this first book the writing is fairly raw and some things hadn't been thought through at this point, but it moves along briskly and sets Harry up as the old fashioned type he is.

The author also established some of the recurring characters in it. Karrin Murphy, the feisty little cop makes her first appearance as did the sexy, but tough, reporter, Susan Rodrigues. Readers first met the spirit in a skull Bob and Harry's giant cat Mister. Gangster Johnny Marcone and his hulking bodyguard Hendricks made their first appearances, as did Bianca; the head of Chicago's thriving vampire community (something that established book's urban fantasy credentials, that and the fact that Harry is a practicing wizard).

I'm happy to report that the suck fairy did not visit Storm Front, and it remains the fresh, fun story it was when I first read it over 10 years ago now.

I may have to delve back even further to find a suitable C author.

Favourite Fantasy Authors and Books A - Z (B)

Last week after doing the A's I promised you the B's, so here they are.

I'll kick it off with Clive Barker. Barker is better recognised as a horror author than a fantasy one, and even his best known fantasy works (Weaveworld and Imajica), tend to be more classified as dark fantasy. Clive Barker actually began his career as a film director in the 70's (something that he still dabbles in today) and only had his first book, collections of short horror stories published in The Books of Blood in the mid '80's. He followed that up with a number of novels, one of which; The Hellhound Heart, became the film Hellraiser (directed by Barker as he felt other screen adaptations of his work had not done them justice). At about the same time Hellraiser hit screens, he also published one of his best known works, Weaveworld. Barker is still writing and working in films, although most of his work in both mediums tends to be more horror than fantasy related, the novel Imajica is one notable exception.

Even in 1987 it was hard to find anything particularly unique or ground breaking in fantasy. That's what Weaveworld is, though. Once people realised it wasn't a horror novel, despite the author's reputation, it made it's way into the read lists of fantasy followers, it also got a fair bit of popularity as a mainstream novel. I haven't seen another story quite like it. It concerns the Seerkind, and how in their attempts to keep themselves and their people hidden from the non magical world which they called The Kingdom of the Cuckoo, they created a world called The Fugue, and wove it into a rug. An entire magical world contained within the weave of a hidden carpet. They're hiding from an avenging angel that they call The Scourge, who seeks to exterminate them. Two young people; Cal Mooney and Suzanna Parish, come in contact with the rug ,and are then drawn into a mad and dangerous adventure, both in and out of The Fugue, in which they are pursued by The Scourge, the ruthless sorceress Immacolata and the charismatic, but venal salesman Shadwell.

It's not just the idea, which is extraordinary, that sets Weaveworld apart from so many other works, but Barker's prose, which can be achingly beautiful and otherworldly all at the same time. His conception of faerie (which is really what The Fugue is), was so real, and at times I wondered if Barker was actually writing down a dream he'd had. It was fittingly nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 1988 (it lost out to Ken Grimwood's equally astonishing Replay, that must have been a very strong year), and was both a commercial and critical success.

Further and related reading: Clive Barker has a fairly extensive catalogue, although only Weaveworld, Imajica and possibly The Thief of Always (written for younger readers, but also intended to be cross generational in appeal), are fantasy, and even they contain as many horror elements as they do fantasy ones. The rest of his work is largely horror, and none of it relates to Weaveworld, which is a standalone novel. I can't think of anything else that contains a vision like Barker's of the world within the carpet. There is Terry Pratchett's The Carpet People, but that's about a race of people so small that their world is a carpet, not a people that wove their world into one. Raymond Feist's foray into dark fantasy produced Faerie Tale, which has a similar feel to Weaveworld at times, although it tends to remind me more of Stephen King. Tad Williams has a different look at a fairy world in his standalone The War of the Flowers, and C.S Lewis used a similar concept of entering a world other than our own through mundane objects like wardrobes and paintings in his Narnia series. It's also hard to go past Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland books for brilliant prose and a mind bending vision.

L. Frank Baum (the L stands for Lyman) May 15, 1856 - May 6, 1919. Baum had a rather chequered career, working as a poultry farmer, operating a theater, storekeeper, journalist and salesman, before achieving immortality as the author of a much loved children's book in 1900 with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He had published plenty during the years when he made his living other ways than writing, but only The Wonderful Wizard of Oz met with much commercial success. Following the success of his first Oz book, Baum went on to write 13 sequels. In addition to the Oz books, he also penned 9 fantasy novels and numerous other novels, short stories and scripts. While he had great success as a writer, Baum's real love was the theater, and even in his lifetime he made a number of attempts to expand Oz beyond the printed page. There was a modestly successful stage adaptation in the early 1900's, although a follow up based on Baum's book The Marvelous Land of Oz, titled The Woggle-Bug for the stage, flopped. A musical version of Ozma of Oz did well enough in Los Angeles, but he couldn't convince producers to try it in New York. The Patchwork Girl of Oz (one of Baum's favourites amongst his own work) was made into a silent film in 1914. At one point L. Frank Baum announced plans for an Oz amusement park (which would have made it one of the worlds first, if not the first, ever theme parks), but nothing ever came of it, and it may have been one of the author's flights of fancy. He started his own film production company in 1914, but it wasn't greatly successful or productive, although Baum didn't lose a lot on it as he didn't invest much of his own money, unlike other failed ventures such as The Fairylogue and Radio Plays. The failure of that, combined with the stress of running the company, transferring it's ownership to his son Frank Joslyn Baum, and the fact that at the time Oz seemed to have become box office poison, contributed to L. Frank's rather early death at the age of 65.

I'm not as enamoured of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as many other fans are. It is however an important book in the evolution of the genre. Baum's intention was to write an American fairytale, something for the modern age, and he accomplished that with Oz, which is indentifiably, unmistakably American and the inclusion of characters like the Scarecrow and especially the Tin Man stamp it as something of a new age. He wanted to remove the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy from the story, although he did still have to include a witch. It's a brisk tale and moves along well, unlike some others though I don't personally think it has that cross generational appeal, it doesn't hold up that well to me on a reread as an adult. The opener and it's sequels did achieve plenty of popularity when they were released, and they're wonderful tales for children, but I'm unsure if it and they would have endured if it were not for MGM's 1939 film. Oz does seem to hold a particular fascination for American authors in particular, and this can possibly be explained by the fact that it was a truly American fairytale.

Further and related reading: first of all there are Baum's 13 Oz sequels, as well as the 26 written after his death, mostly by Ruth Plumly Thompson, but also featuring contributions by John R. Neill (who illustrated many of Baum's Oz books),  Jack Snow, Rachel Cosgrove Payes, Eloise Jarvis McGraw and her daughter. Fantasy author Sherwood Smith also wrote 3 Oz books that are recognised by the L. Frank Baum Family Trust. Eric Shanower and Skottie Young have been producing lavishly illustrated graphic novel adaptations for Marvel Comics. I'd avoid Philip Jose Farmer's Barnstormer in Oz, it's written for adults, and Farmer tended to provide graphic descriptions of both sex and violence in many of his books (A Feast Unknown was originally published as erotica). There have been many screen adaptations of A Wonderful Wizard of Oz, best known are MGM's 1938 Judy Garland film, the animated Journey Back to Oz (1974), featuring the voice work of Judy Garland's daughter Liza Minelli, the all African American The Wiz, originally a stage musical and then a film, as well as the recent The Great and Powerful Oz. Gregory Maguire's Wicked (the story from the witches point of view) was also adapted into the highly successful stage musical of the same name, and there has been talk about a film, Maguire's also written 3 sequels (Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men and Out of Oz). In 2013 John Joseph Adams edited the anthology Oz Reimagined, which contained Oz stories by writers like Seanan McGuire, Tad Williams and Jane Yolen among others. Williams' Otherland series had a computer generated world based on Oz as one of it's many simulations.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz isn't the first of the modern fairytales, nor was it the last. Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio and Lewis Carroll's Wonderland books predate it. J.R.R Tolkien's The Hobbit is very much a modern fairytale as is Alan Aldridge's The Gnole and Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland books about the heartless young September.

Now when I say that the above picture is of Terry Brooks I can hear everyone groan. Bear with me, and I will explain why he's here. Brooks was a practicing attorney when The Sword of Shannara was published in 1977, while the book met with plenty of critical derision, many claiming that it was a shameless rip off of The Lord of the Rings, it achieved commercial success, and Brooks wrote two sequels, which were vastly different from the original, and therefore also quite different from The Lord of the Rings. Plenty of readers believe that the second Shannara book The Elfstones of Shannara was a far superior book to the first one. Once he had a trilogy under his belt, Terry Brooks moved into the world of comic fantasy and wrote a number of Landover books, he was also continuing to add to the Shannara canon while doing this. Since the publication of The Sword of Shannara, Brooks has covered that world from all angles, writing sequels and prequels. Despite the criticism he's received, he has remained a popular author, and has been doing that full time for many years, and he's even got new Shannara novels slated for release in 2015 and 2016. Every so often talk about a TV show based on the books pops up, and that's happened again with the success of HBO's Game of Thrones and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films, however nothing solid has ever come about. There used to be a very active fantasy discussion forum on Terry Brooks' website, but that's since wound up, he does however still maintain a presence at http://www.terrybrooks.net.

This was the one that started it all: The Sword of Shannara. It is often referred to as a Tolkien rip off and it's hard to argue that it's not highly derivative when you can find direct analogues to many of the characters, places and events in the book to The Lord of the Rings. However when it came out in 1977 if you wanted to read epic fantasy you had a choice of The Lord of the Rings...or The Lord of the Rings. I read The Sword of Shannara after The Lord of the Rings, and to be totally honest I had more fun with The Sword of Shannara. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy The Lord of the Rings, or that I couldn't see the similarities and I was probably reading it with the occasional 'I see what you did there' as I went, but as a fairly stock standard fantasy adventure The Sword of Shannara is a damned good read, put the negatives aside and just focus on the positives, and you'll have a good time. Also just to highlight a large difference, to the best of my knowledge The Lord of the Rings is not set on a post apocalyptic Earth, which The Sword of Shannara is. I'm one of those people who prefers The Sword of Shannara to the sequel, but then again that may be because Elfstones doesn't have Panamon Creel in it, and he was always my favourite character. The Sword of Shannara opened up the epic fantasy sub genre, it came out about the same time as Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series and paved the way for things like David Eddings' Belgariad and Raymond Feist's Magician, showed publishers there was a market for this sort of thing, and that turned epic fantasy from a very small niche to a thriving sub genre of it's own.

Further and related reading: there is of course Terry Brooks' many sequels and prequels, still coming out, as well as his non related Landover books, he's also written some non fiction (generally about writing as a craft), and did the novelisations of the films Hook and The Phantom Menace. Similar works to The Sword of Shannara? Well there is of course The Lord of the Rings, which inspired it. Talking about Tolkien rip offs, there's Dennis L. McKiernan's Mithgar series, which began life as a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, which made it's first appearance about the same time as The Sword of Shannara, I've never taken to the Thomas Covenant books, and I can't for the life of me understand why they escaped some of the same criticism levelled at Terry Brooks when they're every bit as derivative. Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is a little like a Tolkien homage, while managing to be fresh and original at the same time. Robert Jordan's massive Wheel of Time series is also another epic fantasy giant and also has the dystopian feel that Brooks mined in The Sword of Shannara, and later it's prequels.

Mikhail Bulgakov - May 15, 1891 - March 10, 1940. During his own lifetime Mikhail Bulgakov was best known as a dramatist. Prior to devoting his work to the theatre he trained as a doctor, and served in the Red Cross in that capacity during the First World War. He was badly injured twice and became addicted to morphine to kill the pain of his injuries. He quit the drug permanently in 1918, and later wrote a book (Morphine) about that period of his life. Following his work for the Red Cross on the front he went back to Russia, and in 1916 became the provincial physician to Smolensk province. He spent two years there and later wrote about the experience in A Country Doctor's Notebook (an adaptation of this was filmed in 2012 as A Young Doctor's Notebook, starring Daniel Radcliffe and John Hamm). He opened a private practice in his hometown of Kiev, and whilst there witnessed no fewer than ten coups. He was drafted into the army as a physician and found himself in the Northern Caucasus, he became ill with typhus and barely survived. This was where and when he started working as a journalist.

Following this illness he abandoned his career as a doctor and became a writer. Joseph Stalin developed a liking for his work (seeing one of his plays 15 times) and personally protected him and found him work, despite having banned some of his earlier plays. He attempted to emigrate a number of times, but permission was always refused on one ground or another. He began work on his most famous work The Master and Margarita in 1928, while continuing to work on other things, he kept a lot of his work hidden, because of repercussions and critical reception (rarely kind) and the bureaucracy that prevented nearly all of his plays from being staged, as well as the refusal to let him leave the Soviet Union, combined to make him strained and unhappy. He died in 1940, with the work for which he would become best known unpublished.

While Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a number of works that contained science fictional or fantastical elements it is for The Master and Margarita that he is best remembered. The book circulated in samizdat form for many years following the writer's death, but was not properly published until 1966 by his widow, who is believed to have been the model for the Margarita in the title. Bulgakov actually burned part of the manuscript and had to rewrite it from memory. It was written as a critique of Soviet society at the time Bulgakov wrote it and the literary establishment at whose hands he personally suffered. It's not really a linear novel, dealing with meetings between Satan and critics and poets debating the existence of Jesus Christ and the Devil. It has a human sized anthropomorphic gun toting cat (Behemoth) who is a favourite of those who read the book. There's also a marvellous description of a fantastical party. It has a story within in a story portraying the interrogation of Christ by Pilate and the crucifixion, this is the piece being written by the Master of the title. There is a reference in the book by the Master to the burning of the manuscript, so the Master is like a number of Bulgakov's main characters, semi autobiographical. It's one of the most original and fantastical books anyone can ever come across. It's also believed to be the inspiration behind the Rolling Stones hit Sympathy for the Devil.

Further and related reading: for a long time the only of Mikhail Bulgakov's works that was available in an English translation was The Master and Margarita, and even then you had to get a good translation. Now I believe that a number of his works, especially A Country Doctor's Notebook, can be found. They're very different to The Master and Margarita, though. I honestly haven't read anything else quite like it, although he has inspired a number of writers, most notably Mick Jagger for Sympathy for the Devil, and Salman Rushdie has admitted that it was an inspiration for The Satanic Verses.

My fifth and final of the B authors is Jim Butcher.  At the age of 25 Jim Butcher created Harry Dresden as an exercise for a writing class. I believe that story is published in the collection Side Jobs, and the character and idea is very rough when compared the more polished version for which the author has became famous. He wrote the first book of The Dresden Files, was lucky enough to find an agent who represented similar authors and work, and the rest as they say is history. Harry has since starred in 15 books, as well as the aforementioned Side Jobs, and all of them have made the NY Times list, generally at number 1. There was also a criminally short lived TV series starring Paul Blackthorn as the Chicago based Wizard for Hire. Butcher ranged outside of his genre of urban fantasy to produce the epic fantasy The Codex Alera, which was something he'd wanted to do as a kid, but was also connected to a bet he'd made with some fellow authors. He completed that in 6 books. The Dresden Files are ongoing, although the author has tried to cap it at about the 20 book mark, not sue if that's still the plan, though. There is a steampunk novel The Cinder Spire due out in 2015. He can be found on the web at http://jim-butcher.com and he also tweets as himself, Harry Dresden and Molly Carpenter (at one point Harry's apprentice).

I'm breaking one of my own rules here (what rules? There are no rules!) about including multiple books, or unfinished series, but I can kind of get away with it. The Dresden Files are all largely self contained, except for Changes, which was continued in Ghost Story, and while there is an overarching story, hence the author saying it will cap out at around book 20, they can mostly be read singly without necessarily having to have read what came before or after. However if you read one, you'll want to read more, because they are highly addictive. I can't really pick a favourite, so I'm putting the series as a whole here. It really did a lot to put urban fantasy on the map and make it more accessible and acceptable to readers, especially those who equate it with paranormal romance, which in a lot of cases is erotica with added vampires and werewolves. Over the course of the 15 books, Harry has battled with and against vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, wizards, witches, fairies, pixies, police and mob bosses, that's just a sampling mind you. One book actually featured him riding the skeleton of a T-Rex. What they are is fun and adventurous, and in a world filled with morally ambiguous anti heroes, Harry is a guy that you're not ashamed to want to succeed, because while he does sometimes make the hard decision, he's always trying to do what is the right thing. In terms of style, its fairly utilitarian, it gets the job done without making a fuss, it's kind of Gandalf if he'd been written by Raymond Chandler.

Further and related reading: I mentioned Jim Butcher's other writing outside of The Dresden Files, with The Codex Alera and the upcoming The Cinder Spire, which I believe is also the first of a series.

Because The Dresden Files are urban fantasy and that's a thriving sub genre, readers are almost spoilt for choice. I originally came to The Dresden Files via Simon Green's Nightside series, which I liked, but wasn't mad about, and then other readers recommended The Dresden Files as being similar, but better. Green did 12 of those, and I tend to think they're more like Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere than The Dresden Files, but ymmv. Jim Butcher's original agent also represented Laurell K. Hamilton, and the early books of her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series do bear some resemblance, Anita was a little like a female Harry, although after a few books they became more about sex than story, and now they seem to be a collection of who Anita's sleeping with held together by the thinnest of storylines. They've created a little sub genre of their own called Vampire Porn. Benedict Jacka's Alex Verus series is a little like a British version of Harry Dresden, he even cheekily references the series in the first book (Fated), only I found the protagonist fairly unlikeable, and he wasn't anywhere near as funny as the author seemed to think he was, and they were also very derivative, there's a fine line between being similar to and derivative, and Fated crossed it. Kevin Hearne has had some success with his Iron Druid series, about the 2,000 year old Atticus O'Sullivan, although after the first couple of books Atticus seems to mainly battle various pantheons of Gods, and his continual comedy monologue kills the tension and can become rather repetitive and unfunny after a while. The closest thing I can find to Harry is Seanan McGuire's October Daye stories, the first book was very similar in tone to The Dresden Files, while being something very different of it's own (no vampires or werewolves, the Cait Sidhe are kind of werecats, though), it just had that same faux hard boiled detective feel to it, the big difference between Toby and Harry is that Toby's half fae and spends most of her time investigating mysteries that involve the fae community of the San Francisco Bay Area. Mercedes Lackey's underrated and little known Diana Tregarde series is also something to consider if you want something like The Dresden Files, Diana refers to herself as a practicing witch, and she battles vampires, Gods and witches, there's only 3 books however, with no plans for more.

I've managed to cover dark fantasy, modern fairytales, epic fantasy and urban fantasy with those 5 authors. I wonder what the C's will bring.

2014 The Printed Page

For as long as I've been blogging regularly I've rounded up all that I read through the year and picked out a few books that were my favourites. I hesitate to use the word 'best' as it's quite subjective and what I think is the 'best' may not be what everyone else thinks is.

This past year I was only able to find 7 works that fitted for me. Surprisingly, or possibly unsurprisingly given my love and championing of the sub genre, 6 of the 7 are urban fantasy. 5 are by female authors and the other 2 are by men.

I cheated a little with two of them. The Geekvamp series by Australian author Narrelle M. Harris is two books (The Opposite of Life and Walking Shadows) and Emma Newman's Split Worlds series (Between Two Thorns, Any Other Name and All is Fair) currently stands at 3 books, although Emma plans to do a kick starter to raise the necessary funds to allow her to publish the final 2 volumes. The reason for this is that like last year with Ian Tregillis' Milkweed triptych I simply couldn't bear to break them up into specific volumes that I liked better than each other.

So here we go, my 7 favourite reads of 2015, this isn't in any specific order, although I kind of put them in as I read them.

Every time Chuck Wendig puts out a Miriam Black book it seems to find itself in this list. I just love the way Wendig uses pop culture references and his hard uncompromising view of the modern world as seen through the jaded and cynical eyes of the cursed Miriam Black, who's 'gift' of being able to see the manner of someone's death with an instant of skin to skin contact won't let her ever live a normal life.

I had read some of Larry Correia's Grimnoir Chronicles, but despite having an omnibus of the first 3 Monster Hunter books on Mt Toberead had never actually dragged it down. I did that earlier this year, and damn it was good. They're a bit of a guilty pleasure basically being full of the hero (Owen Zastava Pitt) systematically killing anything he considers a 'monster'. The third book of the series: Monster Hunter Alpha, is a departure. It's narrated by Earl Harbinger, the head of Monster Hunter International, unlike the first 2 books, which are told by Owen using first person PoV. It also employed a mixture of first person and third person to tell the story. It largely centres around a werewolf invasion in one small midwest town and Earl's efforts to save himself and everyone else from an apocalypse by werewolf. It helps to have read the first 2 books in the series, but it does standalone quite successfully. The 4th book (Monster Hunter: Legion) returned to Owen's narration, I have to confess, that while I enjoyed it, I missed reading things from Earl's point of view.

I originally read most of Seanan McGuire's Sparrow Hill Road stories about the 'pretty little dead girl' Rose Marshall some years ago when I first encountered the writer and these were published over the space of a year on the website Edge of Propinquity. Even then I had the feeling that they'd make a nice collection in a book. Obviously others thought the same because Sparrow Hill Road is those twelve stories, edited, cleaned up, put in an order, given a connecting thread and with one added story to make a baker's dozen. Rose started life as the rather malevolent hot rodding ghost in the song Pretty Little Dead Girl and then later morphed into the rather more benevolent Rose who haunts the roads of the afterlife doing what she can to make people's passing a little easier. The cover is done by Aly Fell, and that neatly makes the connection with Seanan McGuire's InCryptid series, which Aly Fell also does the cover work for. InCryptid and Sparrow Hill Road have a world in common and it's been made apparent that Rose and the Healy Price family from InCryptid are known to each other.

Jacqueline Carey is best known for her Kushiel epic fantasy series, but in recent years she's started to write urban fantasy and Dark Currents is the first Agent of Hel book, featuring the half succubus Daisy Johansson, who works for the Norse goddess Hel keeping her small town of Pemkowet a safe place for both mortals (locals and tourists) and the various supernatural creatures that make their home in Pemkowet. There's a lot of humour in these as well as a touch of romance and Pemkowet is described and imagined so well that the reader is left with the impression that it's a very real place. It's an example of some extraordinary world building that any writer of second world epic fantasy would be proud to call their own.

Kameron Hurley's The Mirror Empire (the opening book of her Worldbreaker Saga) blew me away. It's almost impossible to describe in a few words, it's a truly epic story with an ambitious vision. The words original and unique get thrown around a lot when people review fantasy, especially that of the epic variety. I find that they very rarely apply, they do with The Mirror Empire. I believe that Hurley has broken new ground with this one. Not just the concept of gender fluidity, which has given the book a lot of press, but for things like living sentient flesh eating plants and the idea of two worlds, that while different, are mirror images of each other, even down to containing identical people. I'll be fascinated to see where the author goes with this in the future.

Despite being a regular listener to Emma Newman's podcast (Tea and Jeopardy, not sure if that makes me a 'bless poppet' or not) I hadn't actually read her Split Worlds series. After seeing the author read the opening chapter of Between Two Thorns (the first book) at Worldcon in London, I decided to rectify that. I couldn't tell you which book I preferred the most, so I put in all 3 that are currently published. It's a very different type of urban fantasy. The central character is a member of the faery world who has fled her otherworldly home of Aquae Sulis (what the fae call Bath) for Mundanus (our world) and it's 18th century society of parties and oppressed gender for an independent life in our world which allows her freedoms that her own family and society would never allow. It is wonderfully realised and written and gives the reader characters that they can really care about.

As often seems to happen with this list, two books that I read late in the year managed to slip in. The Opposite of Life and Walking Shadows are urban fantasies and yes they do feature vampires. Unusually they're both set in Melbourne. I only know of one other urban fantasy author who sets her books in my home town (Keri Arthur, a Melburnian, like the author of the Geekvamp books, has set some of hers in the town, although they tend to be more paranormal than anything and I've never really been able to come at paranormal's mix of fantasy, romance and erotica), so it's quite exciting for me to read something featuring the city and the people that live there. Narrelle Harris nailed both the city and the way her central characters acted and spoke. I found them very real and relatable and the next time I wander down Little Bourke Street I'll be keeping a watchful and worried eye out for the alley that locates the vampire club Gold Bug. Huge amounts of fun and if anyone was thinking of writing an Australian character in a book they could do worse than read these for research. It was also nice to see a book in this vein feature an entirely platonic relationship between the human and the vampire.

Witches & Wizards

I decided to cover the two together, because I don't think you can really mention one without the other. They just seem to go together. While most urban fantasy has a magic user of some description in it, witches and wizards do seem to be surprisingly under represented as central characters, but I'll get to that later.

Like ghosts witches and wizards have existed in fiction for as long as people have been telling stories, and they also share other things in common with ghosts, in that many believe witches and wizards are real, even now all over the world.

There were a number of other words used to describe ghosts and that holds true for witches and wizards: enchanter, sorcerer, magician, conjuror, druid, spell caster, mage, warlock, shaman, the list is almost endless and new terms seem to crop and be rediscovered or come into popular use on a regular basis.

While people have always told stories about witches and wizards they're not as well represented as one might think. There's probably a two fold reason for this. One is that due to the belief in witches and wizards and their powers people may have been a bit concerned that to speak against them, or even about them, may draw undue attention and have them cursed or enchanted. The other is that for a long time, particularly in Europe during the middle ages, and even into the Renaissance, being suspected of practicing witchcraft was an offence punishable by death. Writing or speaking about it could see someone hauled in by the Inquisition for torture and possibly a fairly unpleasant death (burning seems to have been a rather popular option). This also spread to the Americas and the Witchfinders were every bit as dedicated as their European counterparts when it came to ferreting out suspected practitioners of witchcraft.

It's also rather interesting to look at the portrayal of witches as opposed to wizards. Witches were almost always the villain of the piece and they were quite often drawn as unattractive old crones, who ate children and had sinister black cats as familiars, they also flew around on broomsticks and had a penchant for black clothing. Wizards on the other hand were kindly old chaps with long white beards, robes of varying colours, they carried staffs and were often mentors of young square jawed heroes.

Even in Arthurian legend Merlin comes out of it rather well and his nemesis is an evil witch called Morgana Le Fay.

Witches often popped up in Grimm's fairytales and other European folktales. They were generally villains in those too. They lived away from society deep in the woods and shunned human contact, unless it was to take over a kingdom or eat lost children.

It was probably Shakespeare who first started the idea of witches as scarred, unattractive crones crouched over a steaming cauldron and tossing in such delicacies as eye of newt into their potions, with his trio in Macbeth. Other writers took their cue from the bard and continued to work on his prototype. They often appeared in covens of three, too. Terry Pratchett lampooned it all very successfully with his Witches books in his long running Discworld comic fantasy series. Characters like Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg subverted that trope wonderfully well.

L. Frank Baum attempted to put a different spin on witches in his Oz books. Yes, the Wicked Witch of the West was green skinned and rather crone like, but Glinda the Good Witch was young and blonde and beautiful (she rather reminded me of the Blue Fairy in Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio) and Ozma was younger again (I really like Bill Willingham's Ozma in Fables as a girl in her early teens, but wiser than her looks would lead one to believe).

However Walt Disney went back to the evil witch trope in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Snow White's evil stepmother Grimhilde looked young and vital, but that was an illusion and she was black hearted, attempting to kill her stepdaughter, so that she could have the throne, the kingdom and be the fairest of them all into the bargain.

Hollywood didn't really seem to take to the witch, I'm not sure why and it was our old friend Thorne Smith who dragged the concept kicking and screaming away from what had been done for centuries. Smith's final book: The Passionate Witch (it was unfinished at the time of his death, completed by Norman H. Matson and published posthumously. Matson also put out a sequel Bats in the Belfry) was about a more modern type witch. It was later filmed as I Married a Witch, which along with the film Bell, Book and Candle formed the basis for the 1960's TV series Bewitched.

In terms of cartoons and comics witches were good business. Following the success of Casper the Friendly Ghost, Harvey Comics created Wendy the Good Little Witch. She was a pretty little blonde girl who wore a red cloak and hat, she also flew around on a broomstick, but had been raised by three, green skinned, warty stereotypical witches, who despaired of her ever being bad.

For some reason Archie Comics produced a series in the 1960's about a teenage witch called Sabrina who lived near Riverdale in Greendale. She was the focus of the Groovie Goolies spin off cartoon. The character had her own comics, her own animated series, there was a live action movie made and later a successful long running TV sitcom, starring Melissa Joan Hart.

TV show Bewitched (1964 - 72) really showed that there was a market for witches out there, and it's star wasn't a warty old woman with green tinged skin, she didn't hang about around a smoking cauldron, chanting horrible things or drop lizard and amphibian parts into it, she looked and acted like a stylish and attractive young '60's suburban housewife and later mother. Even her mother Endora, although sort of the villain of the piece didn't conform to the standard view of witches, nor did her dotty great aunt Clara.

The show was very popular and probably paved the way for witch themed TV shows from that point on. It's doubtful that shows like Charmed would have been made if not for Bewitched, even Sabrina's live action show may never have happened. The show also prompted a similar themed show in I Dream of Jeannie which featured a pretty female genie.

Bewitched had a rather weird morality that can probably be attributed to the time it was made. I could probably do a blog post on that alone to be honest. They did keep trying to recreate the show's popularity.  Lisa Hartmann played Tabitha Stevens. the grown up daughter of Elizabeth Montgomery's Samantha Stevens in 1977, but the show never took off and had a very short run. The less said about the Nicole Kidman 2005 film remake the better. There's actually a proposal to make a new Bewitched at present, focussing on Tabitha's daughter Daphne, but it has not been picked up yet and it may never happen.

Pickings were pretty slim after Bewitched, Sabrina aside, and I never really took to that. The show seemed to revel in it's cheesiness and cheapness and Salem the talking cat annoyed me intensely.

There was a TV movie starring Linda Blair (I know, I know) called Stranger in Our House in 1978 that was rather chilling. I really liked the ending in which it is revealed that despite being seen in a car that went off a cliff and exploded the witch didn't die after all. It begged for a sequel, but this was never made.

The Witches of Eastwick starring Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer as the witches and Jack Nicholson as the Devil was based on John Updike's 1984 novel and was a big hit when it came out in 1987. It wasn't actually that bad a film, but it's success was due more to it's star quality than anything about the story or the film itself.

1996 movie The Craft dealt with teenage witches and was a sleeper hit and later cult favourite.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer featured witches right from the early days. The 3rd episode is called Witch and introduced a recurring character. The first season also introduced Jenny Calendar who originally called herself a techno pagan and was later revealed to be a member of the gypsy tribe that cursed vampire Angelus with a soul. Her tutelage and later tragic death prompted Willow to study witchcraft and become a powerful witch in her own right, as was her girlfriend for a few seasons Tara McClay. Although the two shows did cross over at times, Angel never really dealt with witchcraft as much as it's parent show.

I always found Charmed to be a poor reflection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with witches in place of slayers and demons instead of vampires. However the show about the witchly Halliwell sisters ran for 8 years and garnered quite a following.

Supernatural also has plenty of witches popping in and out, but they're not the focus of the show.

In 2012 CW had a short lived show called The Secret Circle that centred around a group of teens with supernatural powers, it was based on a series of successful teen novels of the same name by L. J Smith.

Witches interestingly enough don't really seem to be a hit in urban fantasy. Anita Blake has magical ability, but she's a reanimator, not a witch as such. The best example I can think of was Mercedes Lackey's Diana Tregarde series. Diana's a wiccan, who describes herself as a practicing witch. It was unfortunate that at the time Lackey wrote the books they didn't really take off commercially, because now they'd be a huge hit, and the author doesn't seem to have a great interest in writing about the character anymore.

Now while the witch was making a name for herself and changing her look the wizard went his not so humble way as well.

Merlin was always popular, and had plenty of imitators. Largely every wizard in books since Le Morte de Arthur seemed to be physically based on Arthur's court wizard. Even Gandalf shared more than a bit in common with Merlin.

Whereas witches were often evil, wizards generally weren't. There were evil wizards, Saruman and Sauron spring to mind, but they were usually balanced out by someone like Gandalf. Witches weren't often extended that courtesy. There were plenty of imitators once Lord of the Rings became big business. Terry Brooks' Allanon from his Shannara series, David and Leigh Eddings' Belgarath (although he did have a daughter Polgara who was equally as powerful and popular as he was, they both got origin books), Raymond Feist's Pug from his Midkemia books and it could even be argued that Joe Abercrombie's scheming, manipulative Bayaz is a subversion of the wizardly trope, but they're all from epic fantasy.

Next to Merlin and Gandalf it could be argued that the most famous of wizards is a kid with spectacles by the name of Harry Potter. He and his alma mater Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry put young witches and wizards on the map and into the public consciousness in a big way, both through the books and the movies that were made from them. I tend to think that Harry probably owes more to his creation to Ursula Le Guin's Duny/Ged/Sparrowhawk than anything.

Before this Enid Blyton kept the fires burning in the imaginations of children. Both her witches and wizards were rather stereotypical and they were peripheral to the main stories, but they were an element and an important one that that.

Hollywood never really seemed to take to wizards prior to the live action version Lord of the Rings. I suppose they appeared in the occasional low budget sword and sorcery, but that seemed about it.

There was a 1970 - 71 British TV series called Catweazle about an inept  11th century wizard, who despite his rather dubious talents as a wizard manages to transport himself from his cave in the 11th century to the modern day and winds up living on a farm and being assisted in this strange new world by a young boy called Carrot. Most of the humour in the series came from Carrot's attempts to hide his friend from his father and coming to grips with modern technology (he refers to a telephone as a 'telling bone' and thinks it's magical). There were also novelisations of the episodes and seasons of the show.

Wizards didn't really get TV shows of their own. I guess they just weren't as entertaining pre Harry Potter as witches. There was an American sitcom called Mr. Merlin, that ran for one season. It had the famous wizard as a kindly, but mysterious garage owner who has to guide teenager Zac through life because he pulled Excalibur disguised as a crowbar out of a bucket of cement. It was rather predictable and never really worked, though. Only mildly amusing, occasionally and only if you had nothing else to watch.

1998 saw a TV mini series called Merlin, starring Sam Neill as a younger version of the legendary wizard and showing how he came to his power.

When it came to wizards on TV they just never seemed to get past Merlin. 2008 saw Merlin premiere on BBC One. The show was also nicknamed Camelot 90210, because of it's pretty and youthful cast. I found it rather hit and miss. It was hard to buy the premise that Merlin started off as a kitchen hand in Camelot and became a young Arthur's squire (he was actually slightly younger than Arthur), and it was often quite ridiculous. It also required a major suspension of belief in that Merlin could hide his magic from Arthur for as long as he did, without Arthur, dim as he was, not working it out. It seemed to be a running gag that Merlin was an awful liar, but no matter how feeble his stories were, Arthur never worked them out until the final season. The company that made the show have never been able to repeat the success with other legends, despite trying with Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts (Atlantis).

Similar to witches, while there are plenty of male magic workers in urban fantasy there aren't many that are main characters, although it's starting to come around. Of course Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden is the most prominent. Harry Copperfield Blackstone Dresden actually advertises himself as a Wizard for Hire, and he's the star of a highly successful series of books and a short lived, but underrated TV show also called The Dresden Files, which was axed far too soon.

Benedict Jacka has a series about a character called Alex Verus, who is largely an English version of Harry. I read the first book, but found the main character intensely annoying, so didn't stick with it.

Kevin Hearne has a series about Atticus O'Sullivan, a 2,000 + year old Irish Druid, who consorts with gods and mythological creatures, that's quite a lot of fun, even if the best bit is Atticus' talking wolfhound Oberon.

Laura Resnick's Esther Diamond urban fantasy series, while being about the struggling actress Esther has as another major character, her friend Maximilian Zadok, a 350 year old Hungarian wizard. The first book in the series Disappearing Nightly, was about a stage disappearing trick that went horribly wrong and the third book Unsympathetic Magic dealt with voodoo.

Recommended reading and watching:

Books:
Various retellings of the Arthurian legend, best traditional version is T.H White's The Once and Future King. I personally recommend Parke Godwin's Firelord, but Merlin is hardly mentioned in that one.
Macbeth by William Shakespeare.
The Oz books by L. Frank Baum.
The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien
The Passionate Witch by Thorne Smith.
Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien.
The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin.
The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike.
The Diana Tregarde series by Mercedes Lackey.
Harry Potter books 1 - 7 by J.K Rowling.
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher.
The Esther Diamond series by Laura Resnick.

Movies:
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
I Married a Witch (1942)
The Witches of Eastwick (1987)
The Craft (1996)
Harry Potter (2001 - 2011)

TV Shows:
Bewitched (1964 - '72)
Catweazle (1970 - 71)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 - 2003)
The Dresden Files (2007)
Merlin (2008 - 2012)

Ghosts

I've covered vampires and werewolves as staples of supernatural fiction or urban fantasy, so now it's the turn of the ghost. To be honest the ghost was actually a bit of an afterthought, which is rather silly, because there's probably been more written about them than any of the others. Not many people really think that they'll ever encounter a vampire or a werewolf outside of the pages of an urban fantasy novel or a TV show or film, but ghosts on the other hand, plenty of people who don't believe in vampires and werewolves do still wonder about the existence of ghosts.

For as long as people have been reading, writing and telling stories they've been telling them about ghosts. Part of this comes from a belief in there being a life after death. Becoming a ghost is a kind of way to still be alive following the death of the physical form. There are so many words for ghost: spirit, apparition, spectre, phantom, poltergeist, the list goes on.

In terms of literature I think we've always told ghost stories. It's become a tradition, especially amongst children and young teens to tell scary stories at Halloween and around campfires or on sleepovers. Generally the scary story involves a ghost of some description.

Ghosts have been appearing in literature as early as Homer's Odyssey, where they were described as the inhabitants of the underworld. They also appear in the Old Testament. Roman playwright Plautus and historian Pliny the Younger both wrote accounts of haunted houses. Ghosts also appeared in the work of Seneca.

There are ghost stories amongst the many found in One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. The 11th century Japanese work The Tale of Genji also featured ghost stories.

Ghosts appear regularly in the Elizabethan theatre. Shakespeare made use of ghosts in 3 of his best known plays: Hamlet, Richard III and Macbeth. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy featured a ghost and was later admired and possibly parodied by the likes of Shakespeare, Johnson and Marlowe.

The tradition continued throughout the 16th and 17th century, with the British and Scottish border ballad, even now Scotland seems to be a great place to set a ghost story, with it's rich and often bloody history. Of course one of Scotland's literary greats Sir Walter Scott was fond of a good ghost story.

The classic ghost stories come from the 19th century and the Victorian age and it could be argued that the rise and popularity of writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Sheridan Le Fanu ushered in a golden age for the ghost in fiction. We cannot forget Charles Dickens who gave the world some of the most famous ghosts in the classic 1843 tale A Christmas Carol. I've already mentioned Poe from the American school, but there's also Washington Irving and his The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which like Dickens' A Christmas Carol has been endlessly copied and presented. Even today there's a TV show based on the story. Playwright Oscar Wilde was one of the first to see the comedic potential for a ghost and gave the world The Canterville Ghost. This has been filmed more than once with the 1944 Charles Laughton version being the best of them for mine.

The tradition continued into the 20th century. Fritz Leiber, Ramsey Campbell and even Noel Coward wrote ghost stories. Not surprisingly Coward's Blithe Spirit was a more humorous look at the phenomenon. A writer who is not often mentioned and is my opinion criminally underrated now is Thorne Smith. Smith probably did more for ghost fiction in his day than plenty of other authors of the time who are better known now. He wrote a few fantasies, but he's best known for Topper in 1926. He wrote 2 Topper novels. They concerned a respectable married banker and his experience with a young deceased couple. There were 3 Topper films made, Cary Grant starred in the first of them, and it was also made into a TV show from 1953 to 1955.

The Ghost and Mrs Muir was a 1947 film with Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison, it was based on the 1945 novel of the same name by R.A Dick and it also became a TV series. I remember it better than the Topper show, but it seems to have been less successful on the small screen.

Like the vampire and the werewolf, the ghost also found itself as the subject of film and later TV. Possibly driven by the stories told around campfires and in sleeping bags late at night, and the fact that ghosts are relatively easy to fake on film (you just do some trickery to make the actor look like they pass through something solid and hey presto ghost!) ghost films proliferated.

I've mentioned The Canterville Ghost, Topper, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, all quite successful. Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit was also filmed during the 1940's, a seeming Golden Age for ghost stories in Hollywood. Ghosts also seemed somehow less confronting or scary than vampires or werewolves, which is why they often got filmed as comedies, rather than straight horror. The horror would come later.

In 1977 a book called The Amityville Horror was released. The author claimed that the events in the book really did happen, although there's been a lot conjecture over what actually took place and what was described. Whether it was true or not the book did sell well and became the subject of a 1979 film, also called The Amityville Horror (it was remade in 2005). There were two sequels written to the original book and as well as the 2005 remake there were 10 or 11 other Amityville films, one is due to be released in 2015.

In 1982 Stephen Spielberg brought out Poltergeist, which like The Amityville Horror was closer to horror than anything else and also dealt with an unseen type of ghost known as a poltergeist. It also spawned 2 sequels and there's another remake due for release in 2015.

The Nightmare on Elm Street saga began in 1983 and that gave audiences a new ghostly horror in the form of the facially scarred, razor fingered Freddy Krueger. At last count there were 9 Elm Street films featuring Freddy Kreuger, at one point he battled fellow horror alumni Jason Vorhees (Friday the 13th) and was also a playable character in the video game Mortal Kombat.

The played for laughs came back in 1984 with Ghostbusters (there was also a sequel and there are rumours about a remake, as well as a chart topping song by Ray Parker Jr. that gave us the immortal line: 'who ya gonna call?'). The ghosts in Ghostbusters were a little different to how other films had portrayed them in the past. These ones were brightly coloured balls of ectoplasm, as opposed to the white spectral imaginings of them in the past.

Beetlejuice in 1988 harked back to the Topper style of ghost I felt, with an attractive young deceased couple played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin fighting to save their dream house from being invaded by a new family who had interesting architectural designs. They form an alliance with the unsavoury, amoral Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) and then wind up battling him for the soul of the new family's teenage daughter (Winona Ryder).

1989 saw a  different type of ghost story in the Kevin Costner vehicle Field of Dreams in which a team of ghostly baseball players from the past manage to help the main character sort out his issues with his dead father.

The ghost as a romantic lead was the focus of the 1990 hit Ghost. That showed examples of how a ghost can affect the corporeal world and also helped the main character of the murdered Sam Wheat (Patrick Swayze) find his murderer and bring him to justice. The same year Truly Madly Deeply with Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman came out and was a superior example of a funny ghost story and brought home how annoying having a loved one come back really could become when one of the people is still very much alive.

There's an underrated gem called The Frighteners from 1996. It was one of Peter Jackson's early films, and it really deserved more attention than it got. It reminded me of what Stephen King would do if he played it for laughs. It's another poltergeist type film.

M. Knight Shyamalan's 1999 film The Sixth Sense brought the idea of the ghost right back into the public eye and again showed a way a ghost can influence the real world and those in it, as well as come to terms with their own mortality. The Blair Witch Project also came out in 1999 and was a different type of ghost story, but again brought home how scary they can really be if handled correctly.

Disney attempted to cash in on the Disneyland ride The Haunted Mansion with a film of the same name starring Eddie Murphy in 2003, but it failed to do a Pirates of the Caribbean and didn't make enough to encourage further films, it was also critically panned.

The fact that a few of these films are being remade or given new life in continuing entries into their franchise indicates that ghosts are still popular with the public.

TV has also given ghosts plenty of coverage over the years. As well as the previously mentioned Topper and The Ghost and Mrs Muir, cartoons have been a surprisingly popular form of ghost story.

The most famous of those is Casper the Friendly Ghost, and this was also made as a big screen film in 1995 with Christina Ricci befriending the lonely and harmless child ghost from the cartoons.

Scooby Doo is well known for it's depictions of ghosts, but they were generally hoaxes perpetrated by someone trying to pull a con job and were unmasked at the end by the gang.

Ghostbusters also spawned a cartoon.

There was a mid 70's show called Nobody's House. It was a British children's show about a family that moved into a new house that was built on the site of a Victorian workhouse and the children of that family encountered 'Nobody' an orphan who died in the workhouse.

This sank without a trace, but in 1983 Jennifer Slept Here was to my way of thinking slightly above average. It concerned a fast living Hollywood starlet who died young and as a ghost befriended the teenage son of the family that moved into her old house. Audiences and critics didn't really take to it, and it had a fairly short run.

It wasn't until the 2000's that people really saw the potential, although generally the ghosts aren't the focus of the story. They appeared in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (there was a recent fan made video for a talked about, but never made cartoon that featured Tara as a ghost. I really wish they'd done that with the character for season 7 of the show, it probably would have been more satisfying than the Willow Kennedy pairing of that season, which to me never really worked),  Angel and Supernatural. They were peripherally the focus of both Medium and Ghost Whisperer as well as Tru Calling.

The two shows that did it best though were the UK version of Being Human and American Horror Story: Murder House. The second of those gave me chills, especially Evan Peter's troubled teenaged ghost.

I know I keep mentioning Being Human, but it really was a brilliant show. The concept of a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing a house and a life and trying to be human was so simple, but so well executed. Everything from the performances to the writing just worked in the show.

Harry Potter also featured ghosts in both the books and the films, although I never felt they were elevated above the level of poor parody in the films and worked much better in the book, plus they had more to do. I can't even remember Peeves in the films.

Strangely enough they aren't used a lot in urban fantasy. Anita Blake reanimates corpses, but they're not really ghosts, closer to zombies. I think it's harder to really get the point of ghosts across in urban fantasies than it is other supernatural creatures that are used. Gail Carriger has ghosts in her Parasol Protectorate books, but again they're relatively peripheral.

Jim Butcher is one of the few to do it successfully in The Dresden Files, in fact the 13th book in the series is called Ghost Story. The TV show that was based on the books also presented Bob the Skull as rather ghostly, which isn't quite how he's written.

Cherie Priest's Eden Moore series is about a girl who can see ghosts and uses them to solve mysteries. I haven't read them, but Cherie Priest is very good and these have a southern gothic feel to them.

Laura Resnick has covered a number of supernatural phenomena in her Esther Diamond series and the ghost got it's turn in the 5th book of the series; Polterheist.

Seanan McGuire has Sparrow Hill Road. That went a storied road. It began life as a song on her first album Pretty Little Dead Girl and was the story of a girl called Rose Marshall who died on the way to her high school prom and went on to haunt drivers on Sparrow Hill Road. Rose later appeared in 12 stories on website Edge of Propinquity with an updated story and toned down a little, she'd gone from killing drivers on Sparrow Hill Road to guiding people from one life to the next as a route witch. In 2014 the stories were prettied up, altered a bit, reordered, had another one added to make it an even baker's dozen and released as the book Sparrow Hill Road. Rose apparently shares a universe with one of Seanan's urban fantasy series InCryptid.

Reading and viewing (movies and TV)

Books:
Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
Topper by Thorne Smith.
The Ghost and Mrs Muir by R.A Dick.
Armada Ghost Books edited by Mary Danby (there were about 15 of these, they were largely aimed at younger readers, but they have some excellent examples of the ghost story).
The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson.
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher (especially book 13 Ghost Story)
The Parasol Protectorate by Gail Carriger.
Sparrow Hill Road by Seanan McGuire.

Movies:
Topper (1937)
The Canterville Ghost (1944)
The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947)
Poltergeist (1982)
Ghostbusters (1984)
Beetlejuice (1988)
Field of Dreams (1989)
Ghost (1990)
Truly Madly Deeply (1990)
The Frighteners (1996)
The Sixth Sense (1999)

TV Series:
Topper (1953 - 55)
The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1968 - 70)
Nobody's House (1976)
Jennifer Slept Here (1983 - 84)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 - 2003)
Angel (1999 - 2004)
Supernatural (2005 - present)
Being Human UK version (2008 - 13)
American Horror Story: Murder House (2011)

Werewolves

The other day in the first of a series of post on the stock supernatural types in urban fantasy I covered the evolution of the vampire. Today it's the turn of the werewolf.

Werewolves are often associated with vampires, they quite often occupy the same books, films and TV shows. Sometimes they're allies, but more often vampires and werewolves are enemies.

The werewolf has appeared in legends and myths for a lot longer than vampires have. This makes sense, because in many parts of the world (Australia's one of the few exceptions), people live side by side with wolves, and so legends and myths are told about them.

They tend to be associated with vampires because wolves are a big part of life in the same part of the world, eastern Europe.

Despite this werewolf fiction is not as prominent as vampire fiction and took longer to appear.

The fairytale Little Red Riding Hood is often seen as an attempt to warn children of the dangers in the woods, one of them being wolves, but in recent times it's been reinterpreted as a werewolf story. Angela Carter's 1979 short story The Company of Wolves, filmed under the same name in 1984 took that view and the 2011 Amanda Seyfried film Red Riding Hood, used that idea as well.

Some have attributed werewolf subtext to the Robert Louis-Stevenson classic The Strange Case of Dr  Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, and while the Hyde character is often portrayed as rather animalistic, I don't think there's much there to suggest that he's a werewolf.

They were the subject of a number of gothic horror serialised stories and novels throughout the 19th century, even Alexandre Dumas wrote The Wolf Leader in 1857.

It was, as with the vampire, the American film industry that brought the character into the public imagination. Again during the 1930's werewolf films proliferated. Bela Lugosi became identified with Dracula and Lon Chaney Jr. did the same with the werewolf or 'wolfman' as they were often referred to. In fact singer and songwriter Warren Zevon made reference Lon Chaney Jr's performances as a werewolf in his 1978 classic Werewolves of London. Chaney's wolf man, Lugosi's Dracula and Boris Karloff's Frankenstein appeared as a 'terrible trio' in a number of films during the period.

The werewolf, like the vampire, became a figure of fun over time. No Muppets or Sesame Street characters, but the Archie cartoon spin off The Groovie Goolies featured a hippy werewolf called Wolfie.

I think things changed a bit for the werewolves in 1981 when the film An American Werewolf in London hit the screens. While a lot of the film was quite amusing, it wasn't entirely played for laughs and it had some serious moments, plus it looked at what a curse being turned into a werewolf was for anyone unfortunate enough to have this happen to them.

In 1985 they went back to laughing at the werewolf with the Michael J. Fox film Teen Wolf. The film was actually made before Back to the Future, but released after and it rode high on the lead actor's popularity. It was successful enough to spawn a sequel in 1987 with Jason Bateman replacing Michael J. Fox as the wolfish teen, and playing the cousin of Fox's character. It has more recently been resurrected as a more serious teen drama TV series on MTV.

Werewolves started to appear as staples in urban fantasy at about the same time as vampires did. The Anita Blake's and the Southern Vampire Mysteries feature them. Both series have all sorts of weres and don't just confine it to wolves. In fact Anita slept with almost every were there was.

They popped up in Harry Potter and J.K Rowling took the unusual step of making one a fairly major character and a sympathetic one at that. I was genuinely sad when that one died in the major battle at the end of the series.

The werewolf was also in the Twilight series. Jacob completed the love triangle between Bella and Edward. It was particularly complicated with Edward being a vampire and werewolves and vampires being historical enemies.

They appeared in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with Willow's boyfriend Oz being one for a few seasons. Angel also had a liaison with a female werewolf in his series, and it was particularly amusing in the episode Smile Time when she quite literally tore the stuffing out of him.

Both vampires and werewolves have appeared in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files and Jacqueline Carey's Agent of Hel series as well as Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate where the main character wound up married to one. Carriger brought up the interesting idea of making all male werewolves serve in the military at some point over the long lives.

One of the best portrayals of werewolves in TV was in the British version of Being Human. The show featured a vampire living with a werewolf and a ghost and we saw what I felt were genuine effects of turning once a month.

Suggested reading and viewing list:

Books/stories:
Little Red Riding Hood (fairytale - probably first appeared in written form sometime during the 17th century, most likely in France)
The Company of Wolves by Angela Carter (1979, part of The Bloody Chamber collection)
Discworld series by Terry Pratchett (1983 - present, generally in a book featuring the Ankh Morpork Watch as one of the members Angua is a werewolf)
Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter by Laurell K. Hamilton (as with the vampire recommendation, stop after the first few before she turns into a nymphomaniac)
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher (werewolves first appear in the 2nd book Fool Moon, but pop in and out from then on).
The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris (again the werewolves come in in the second book).
The Parasol Protectorate by Gail Carriger.
Agent of Hel by Jacqueline Carey.

Movies:
The Wolf Man (1931)
I Was A Teenage Werewolf (1957 worth it for the curiosity value of seeing a young Michael Landon in the main role. I think footage of it may have been used in Michael Jackson's Thriller film clip)
An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Ladyhawke (1985)
Teen Wolf (1985)
Underworld (2003)
Red Riding Hood (2011)

TV shows:
Dark Shadows (1968)
Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1997 - 2003)
Angel (1999 - 2004)
Being Human (UK version 2008 - 2013)
True Blood (2008 -2014)
Teen Wolf (2011 - now)