Blood Price (Saturday Book Club)

• From Wikipedia

Book: Blood Price
Author: Tanya Huff
Genre: Urban Fantasy/Horror/Paranormal Romance
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One of the things that I’m studying in the genre of urban fantasy is how a series works. If you do it right, you end up with an established character, a dedicated fanbase, and possibly even get optioned for a TV series based on your books, or even films. When studying popular series writers like Rowling, Butcher, and Hamilton, I gleaned from interviews that they wrote these series because they loved the settings and characters and their fans. Tanya Huff, however, states implicitly in the introduction to Blood Price, the first novel of her vampire detective series, that she doesn’t care much for vampire fiction. She wrote the series because vampire fiction has an established loyal fanbase and she wanted a new house. The series spawned six books and got picked up by Lifetime.

So how did she do it? There’s plenty of books out there with fangs on the cover or between the pages, and contrary to her opinion, the vampire fan community doesn’t just buy anything with a bloodsucker in it. While reading Blood Price, however, I did notice a lot of familiarity with the characters and situations, mostly because what Huff does do right with the Blood Books is that she looks to hit every vampire protagonist stereotype that she can. Henry Fitzroy is rich, powerful, of European descent, talented at almost everything he does, and bisexual (and more importantly, a female-biased bisexual). The justification for the wealth, power, and talent is provided by his longevity, as the reader can assume he’s just picked all that up over the course of the centuries, even though his day-job as a writer of cheesy bodice-rippers would hardly pay for the lavish Toronto apartment he lives in.

The dynamic of Henry’s relationship with the series lead, Vicki Larson, has all the prerequisites of a meet-cute. She’s an ex-cop human private investigator with night-blindness. He’s an observant vampire who wants to do the right thing and can’t act during the day. They’re opposites with chemistry and together they fight crime.

The plot feels more like an afterthought. There’s a serial killer loose and a nerdy college kid who’s way too into Dungeons and Dragons turns out to be behind it all. Even though the end result should be surprising, the plot gives no room for speculation. The third person omniscient view would have worked better had it been limited to simply Vicki and Henry rather than every single victim, side-character, and the antagonist.

Even the relationship gives no surprises. Huff tries to set up a triangle with Vicki’s former partner/ex-boyfriend on the force, but other than some good arguments you can’t see why these two were ever together, much less why they’d reconcile. It seems more of a distraction, a weight to throw into the “will they or won’t they” question between Vicki and Henry, which stands as a given by the middle of the first book in the series.

However, it could be the formula that’s the draw here. When you read the Blood Books, you’re getting exactly what you pay for, and exactly what you expect. It’s like comfort reading. While I myself don’t plan to slavishly follow the urban fantasy series formulas (which I’m still figuring out), I do believe it will make me a better writer to examine the advantages and disadvantages of doing so.

See you next Saturday! :)