Kitty's Greatest Hits

gathering these stories together and looking back—damn, I’ve been busy! I had no idea! I’ve made this whole world! The only thing better than building up a whole world is having people want to read about it. So, to Kitty’s fans and readers: Thank you. Most of these stories wouldn’t exist without you and your interest in Kitty’s world.

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In the tradition of the playlists I’ve matched a song with each story that I think captures the feeling or tone of the story or character.

(This collection doesn’t include the first two Kitty short stories that appeared in Weird Tales in 2001 and 2003. Those stories, “Doctor Kitty Solves All Your Love Problems” and “Kitty Loses Her Faith,” became part of the first novel, Kitty and The Midnight Hour.)

“Il Est Né” (Taverner Consort, “Il Est Né”)

This story originally appeared in Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, an anthology of werewolf holiday stories edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner. Half the fun of some of these stories is seeing what the characters are up to between books. This fits neatly into Kitty’s arc, right before the events of Kitty Takes a Holiday: She’s taking what she’s learned so far and using that knowledge to help others.

“A Princess of Spain” (Sally Potter, “Pavanne” from Orlando)

I wrote this for an anthology called The Secret History of Vampires, edited by Darrell Schweitzer and Martin H. Greenberg. The theme: What turning points in history featured vampires manipulating events behind the scenes? My favorite historical turning point happened early in the sixteenth century, in England, with the death of Henry VII’s eldest son, Arthur. Henry VIII wasn’t originally meant to be king of England. An England without Henry VIII—without the Protestant Reformation in England, without Queen Elizabeth and the naval triumph over the Spanish Armada—is a very different England indeed. It’s an incredible tipping point, and I think its most fascinating player is Catherine of Aragon, who married Arthur before she married Henry and who was an unsuspecting and mostly unwilling lynchpin. The question of whether or not her marriage to Arthur was ever consummated is still hotly debated, as it was when Henry VIII pursued his divorce from her.

“Conquistador de la Noche” (Procol Harum, “Conquistador”)

Rick is probably the most interesting character from the novels who gets the least amount of time in the spotlight. So many secrets, so much history, and I never really get a chance to talk about any of it because in the novels the characters so rarely just sit down and tell each other stories. I wrote this one because I wanted to know, finally, Rick’s origin. I had dropped hints—that he knew Coronado and was part of his famous expedition—but I needed to know the details.

Research-wise, this story was fascinating because it takes place in something of a shadow period in Mexico’s history. The conquistadors and Coronado’s expedition north are quite well documented. The colonial period and mission system that progressed as far north as modern-day California are also well documented. But there’s a forty- or fifty-year gap in between that I had a hard time finding information on. This is one of the frustrations and thrills of writing historical pieces—searching for as many scraps of information as you can, then fitting them together into a living world.

I want to write a lot more about Rick—he has five hundred years of history to cover, after all.

“The Book of Daniel” (Loreena McKennitt, “The Mystic’s Dream”)

When I started writing stories about the supernatural existing in the real world, I looked at a lot of old tales, mythology, and folklore with new eyes. Every kid with a Judeo-Christian background knows the story of Daniel and the Lions’ Den, the Biblical tale about a Hebrew prophet constantly getting in trouble with the Babylonian and Persian kings. I figured in a world with werewolves and shape-shifters, that story would look very different.

Writing this let me play in an amazing setting: The city of Babylon at the height of its power, home of the famous Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the epic Ishtar Gate with its glazed blue bricks and row after row of marching lions and bulls.

This is also a good example of how little I have to make up whole cloth in the end. Endless stories and real- world settings are out there waiting to be told and retold. Writing about a world in which the supernatural is real opens so many possibilities—I get to turn that lens on all of history and tell new stories about what really happened.

“The Temptation of Robin Green” (Tempest, “The House Carpenter”)

I think this is the very first story I wrote involving anything having to do with the Kitty universe, although I didn’t know it at the time. Here’s how it happened: I wanted to write a story about a secret lab studying supernatural creatures. I included a vampire called Rick. Then I decided that anytime I had a vampire in a story, I would call him Rick, and he would theoretically be the same vampire. He would be a nice guy—Duncan MacLeod- ish, even—traveling through history, helping people while trying to keep to himself. When Kitty showed up, of course I had to include vampires, and I brought Rick along for the ride.

Years later I retrofitted the story for The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance, edited by Trisha Telep. At that point I could have changed the name and not brought Rick into it all, but I decided to keep the artifact of the earlier draft. I hesitate to speculate where this falls on the actual Kitty time line. I also have no idea how Rick ended up as a lab rat. I’ve almost decided this story is completely apocryphal, but it’s fun to see what I was thinking about at the time.

One more note about this story: I had seen one too many TV shows and movies featuring secret military laboratories that were very high tech, gleaming, and scary. However, my father was an actual, real-life military scientist for part of his career. After his stints as a B-52 pilot, he worked as a research chemist, specializing in electrochemical processes, batteries, and so on. He even worked a brief period at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (home of the Manhattan Project). I toured his lab at the Air Force Academy once, and it wasn’t anything like you see on TV. It had originally been built in the sixties, and it showed: aged tile, fluorescent lighting, kind of small and cramped, equipment shoved in corners or wherever else it would fit, old steel desks and chairs, and so on. I decided that a secret government laboratory, even one studying supernatural beings, would look more like a poorly funded college science department than a high-tech wonder.

“Looking After Family” (Vangelis, “Movement V” from El Greco)

Of all these stories, this one may be the most revealing, and one of the most important in its effect on the novels. In the course of writing the first couple of novels, the relationship between Cormac and Ben developed slowly. Ben appeared on the scene in the first book because I needed a lawyer character. By the second book, I wanted the two of them to have the kind of close friendship that meant they would take a bullet for each other. So they became cousins who grew up together—brothers, for all intents and purposes. At that point, I needed to know what had happened to get them into that situation, and how they came to trust each other. I needed to know how Cormac learned to hunt supernatural beasts, what happened to his family, what traumas drive him. I wanted that background to be realistic, concrete, and visceral.

In some ways, I see this as Cormac and Ben’s origin story. We get to see them as teens and get to see a little of how they became the men they are. In my own mind, I’m constantly referring back to this story as something of a benchmark for them. This is where they came from.

“God’s Creatures” (Curtis Eller’s American Circus, “Sweatshop Fire”)

I wrote this for P. N. Elrod’s anthology Dark and Stormy Knights. Cormac was the obvious choice for a story on such a theme. I wanted to show what a typical day in the life of a werewolf hunter like Cormac might look like.

I was raised Catholic, and bringing these stories together I can see signs of that in many of them. That background definitely influenced my decision to set this story where I did. Saint Catherine’s is loosely based on St. Scholastica, a Catholic school in Cañon City, Colorado, where two of my great aunts, who were Benedictine nuns, taught. As far as I know, neither one of them was a werewolf.

“Wild Ride” (Cake, “The Distance”)

Another origin story—T.J.’s this time. T.J. only appeared in one of the novels (or maybe a couple of others, depending on what counts as an appearance), but he’s still one of the more significant characters in the series because of his impact on Kitty.

The metaphors regarding lycanthropy as disease and HIV and lycanthropy as identity and homosexuality are pretty clear-cut. I’m not the first person to make them. In fact, I’ve used a rough outline of the history of AIDS awareness to model what might happen if lycanthropy were ever identified as a disease: A long period of great