Putting Feathers Up Your Butt

By June Pulliam

02/02/2006

Armstrong, Kelley. Haunted. New York: Spectra, 2005.  528 p.

Haunted is Kelley Armstrong’s latest installment in the Women of the Otherworld series and is the sequel to Dime Store Magic and Industrial Magic. Its complex cosmology and mixture of an ass kicking heroine immediately put me in mind of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Guilty Pleasures series. And here, dear reader, I must make a wee confession: I have read very little of Hamilton’s series, and am also wholly unfamiliar with Dime Store Magic and Industrial Magic, though I’ve read Bitten, so you must forgive me if this review cannot deftly compare Haunted to the author’s other works.

Haunted is also an example of one of those hybrid genre novels, in this case a cross between romance and horror—a combination that has been becoming increasingly more popular as of late. And here, dear reader, I must make another confession: until reading this novel I was unfamiliar with this particular type of crossover. If you have a peek at our list of contributors, or my bio for that matter, you’ll notice that I am unusual in that I am a woman who enjoys horror, and extreme horror at that. As an adolescent, while other girls my age were reading bodice rippers, I was reading about Jack the Ripper. I found the genre of romance tiresome, and so was not likely to poke my head into horror fused with romance.

So this being my maiden voyage into the often pirated stories of the romance genre, I must say that I was pleasantly surprised.

I think I have hated romance novels for so long not because I am bored by the genre’s primary emphasis—relationships—but because I am annoyed by characters who follow rules of behavior that piss me off. I do not like it when a female character allows a man to treat her like dirt for 250 pages, forgiving him time and time again, because in the end he will see that she is a shining example of virtue and be tamed by the revelation.

I was pleasantly surprised by Haunted. While Eve, the main character, is certainly as interested in relationships as she is anything else, she also is not a wilting flower of femininity. During life, Eve was a witch who got herself in trouble by playing with black magic. This dalliance cost Eve her mortal existence, so now she is spending her afterlife looking in on her now teenaged daughter. But the hereafter isn’t informed by maternal fretfulness alone. Being a ghost isn’t such a terrible fate since Eve is allowed to meet up with her old flame Kris, who has also passed on, and the two have enough of a corporeal existence to engage in sex with relative frequency.

Unfortunately, the angels want Eve for one of their own, and send her on a dangerous mission: she must catch a Nix (not to be confused with a Nixon, although it is easy to do so), a demon that can possess willing humans and spur them to commit breathtaking acts of violence. Of course, since angels are allegedly some of the most powerful immortals in this universe, you might wonder why they don’t just do the job themselves. It turns out that this particular Nix has grown so powerful that she has already put two angels into “early retirement.” One of them has become completely paranoid and dysfunctional as a result of her encounter.

So while their confidence in her might mean that Eve has been given this once in a lifetime opportunity so she can be eligible for a promotion, it also means that just maybe…she’s been set up. We get a chance to see just what Eve is made of when she goes after another immortal who can tell her how to capture the Nix. This man is a serial killer, and is kept in a special place in the afterlife reserved for people like him, a village consisting of nothing but serial killers who can torture one another for all eternity. Since serial killers tend to be mostly male, this village has no women, so when Eve arrives, she is immediately set upon by several of these beings who would like nothing better than to torture and dismember her for all eternity. Did I mention that immortals can also feel pain under some circumstances?

Meanwhile, back at the cloud….. Eve has yet another incentive to capture the Nix. The Nix has learned that Eve is on her trail, and has subsequently learned of the existence of Eve’s daughter—and has UNSPEAKABLE plans for her.

So, given all this positive press, you may be asking yourselves, uh, Miss June, why the title of this review? Do you have something against Kelley Armstrong’s novel, or this type of genre hybrid?

I reiterate, Haunted is my first full blown foray into this blend of romance and horror, and one thing that strikes me as characteristic of this type of writing is that the horror seems to be subordinate to the romance. While Haunted contains gut-wrenching scenes full of gore, particularly when Eve fights the immortal serial killers, these things, or the monsters themselves, are not the main focus of the novel, so I cannot help but ponder whether or not this hybrid can be truly thought of as horror. After all, as Tyler Durden says, sticking feathers up your butt doesn’t make you a chicken. Therefore, does the author’s inclusion of a monster or a few horrific elements make a novel a work of horror? This is a question for which I have no answer, but I hope, dear reader, that if you answer in the negative, that you won’t take me too much to task (after all, I wouldn’t want my sig other to do a Mrs. Alito) for deciding to even review this novel, since this humble zine is first and foremost about things that go bump in the night, and not in a good way.

While I didn’t like Haunted as much as I did Armstrong’s werewolf novel Bitten, I must admit that I found it to be a page turner with memorable characters and an extremely complex pantheon of immortals. And best of all, the female characters aren’t the standard fare of romance; rather, they are witty, take no prisoners, and throw a mean round house kick to the jaw. While Laurell K. Hamilton’s characters and plot left me cold (I could only get through the first 100 pages of Guilty Pleasures before I got bored and put it down forever), Armstrong’s writing is a good deal more compelling and fun.