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Kitty’s House of Horrors

Carrie Vaughn

Published 2010               292 pages

Summary (from the book jacket)

Celebrity werewolf and radio host Kitty Norville is sceptical when she’s invited to participate in a reality TV show about the supernatural. Being trapped in a remote lodge with an assortment of vampires, psychics and lycanthropes is hardly her idea of a time (especially the vampires!). Still, she can see that making the show could help viewers understand the supernaturals living amongst them are real people, instead of just a freak show, and she agrees to leave her husband and the safety of her pack to join the cast.

At first, it all goes well – until the morning they wake up to find the electricity’s been cut off, the phones are dead, and the crew has vanished. They’ve walked into a trap, and now someone’s about to start picking them off, one by one…

Can Kitty marshal a set of psychics, were-creatures, and starving vampires to escape – or fight back – before they are all killed?

The Review

Kitty’s House of Horrors is the seventh book in Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville urban fantasy series. The Kitty books follow the (mis)adventures of Kitty Norville, late-night talk show DJ and America’s first publicly outted werewolf. The book is part of a long-running series and while it is a self-contained adventure, there is also a cross over of characters from past novels, so it’s probably best read as part of the series rather than a stand alone story.

Kitty’s House of Horrors sees Kitty make her first foray into television. She is picked to be part of a new reality TV show, some kind of cross between Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity but with supernatural housemates rather than the regular weirdo humans and C-list celebrity types that reality TV show producers usually choose as contestants. Initially Kitty’s fears are limited to whether she will be able to stand being in a confined space with her housemates and whether she will come across well on television but it soon becomes apparent that she has bigger problems than accidently picking her nose on TV!

Firstly, her housemates are an uncomfortable mixture of friends and potentially dangerous enemies. On the friend side of the equation are the psychics Tina and Jeffrey, and Odysseus Grant a Las Vegas stage magician, all characters from previous books and participants in previous Kitty adventures. On the potential enemy side of the equation are Anastasia and Gemma a duo of beautiful yet deadly vampires. Although Kitty has a vampire friend (Rick the master of Denver) generally vampires in Kitty’s world are bad news. They like to play long-running power games, care little for werewolves and are as untrustworthy as they are deadly.

Secondly, it isn’t long before the happy campers find themselves cut off from civilisation with a fast rising body count as an unknown assailant starts to pick them off one-by-one. Naturally the group of disparate supernaturals soon starts to fall apart under the stain, all of them disinclined to trust each other.

Kitty’s House of Horrors follows a fairly standard horror story plot. Even Kitty herself seems to be aware that she is trapped in a basic horror movie scenario. As the group starts to argue amongst itself, Kitty counsels individuals against storming off alone, asking them if they weren’t aware that this is when people die in horror films.

The melding of realistic urban fantasy with classic horror works well in Kitty’s House of Horrors, taking readers on creepy journey as Kitty tries to save herself and her fellow contestants from horrific fates at the hands of… actually I’m not going to tell you because that would spoil story but I think you get the general idea.

Kitty Norville is one of the most believable protagonists in urban fantasy today and this latest series instalment continues to build her character credibility. Kitty’s House of Horrors is a solid horror fantasy mystery. Enjoy.

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