The vampire, Henry Fitzroy, turns out to be a harmless sort – he spends his time writing romance novels, an idea that plays right into the Munsters Factor. With Blood Price, Tanya Huff takes the straightforward tack of giving us multiple degrees of supernatural being, each one moving further from the mundane. Some stories will embrace the Munsters Factor as a source of parody (as in, well The Munsters) others will do a sort of dance with it, treating their horrors as cartoonish jokes at certain points while lending them weight elsewhere (as in Buffy) while still others fail to notice that the issue exists in the first place and fall flat ( Twilight). Much urban fantasy will, at some point, have to confront what I’ve come to think of as the Munsters Factor: that the more you integrate beings of supernatural horror into mundane settings, their scariness wanes and their silliness grows. (As an aside, he would also fit right into Buffy, demon-summoning intact.)

Aside from his means of committing these murders – namely, summoning demons – he could easily have turned up in a straight crime novel. The villain, Norman Birdwell, has an utterly mundane motive: he is a bullied college nerd who stoops to murder as a way of getting revenge against the women who rejected his advances.

Her day-to-day life hits familiar crime fiction beats, as she bickers with her partner from her days as a police detective and is ultimately vindicated. The main character, Vicki Nelson, is a private investigator who has no prior involvement with the supernatural. The beloved read it and said, “You know, instead of writing a vampire book, why don’t you write a Tanya Huff book with a vampire in it.” And so that’s what I did. So I wrote the first chapter of my “vampire book” and it just wasn’t working. We were thinking of buying a house in the country and so would need a mortgage and vampire books came with a large-and, as I mentioned, loyal-fanbase built in. In a desperate search for something decent to read they’ll cross their fingers and pick up just about anything with fangs on the cover. Well, at the time I was working at Bakka-a science fiction bookstore in Toronto-and I noticed that vampire readers are very loyal. Here, Tanya Huff states that she had the idea for the novel back in 1989, and gives the commercially-minded decision behind its conception: Or, more accurately, I’ve been reading the 2006 omnibus edition that also includes the sequel, Blood Trail, and a new introduction by the author. I’ve been reading Tanya Huff’s book Blood Price, published back in 1991.

Blood Price by Tanya Huff