Carrie Vaughn: Kitty's Greatest Hits

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 confusion, ignorance, and fear at every level, with activism and advocacy coming from the communities most affected by the issues.

My terrible secret is that I first made T.J. gay so readers wouldn’t expect a romance between him and Kitty. Once I’d done that, though, I had a great opportunity to include a nonstereotypical tough gay character in the first novel. I also had the opportunity to make some of those metaphors explicit, which they are in this story.

I originally wrote this one for Running with the Pack , edited by Ekaterina Sedia.

“Winnowing the Herd” (Too Much Joy, “William Holden Caulfield”)

And this story gives us a glimpse of what Kitty’s life looked like before the books started.

I read two stories in a row, “Gestella” by Susan Palwick and “Laika Comes Back Safe” by Maureen F. McHugh. These are both gut-wrenchingly depressing stories in which werewolves stand in as metaphors for horrible tragedies. I wanted to write a literary-type story, like these, in which the werewolf did not die horribly and wasn’t depressing, so I recruited Kitty and sent her to the KNOB staff party, where we get her interior monologue about the proceedings.

This takes place before The Midnight Hour and before Kitty was outed.

“Kitty and the Mosh Pit of the Damned” (Dead Kennedys, “Holiday in Cambodia”)

This started with the title. My friends have learned over time that if we’re all sitting around, maybe or maybe not drinking, and we start throwing around crazy ideas that in most groups would be forgotten by morning, I’m as likely as not to grab them and run with them. It’s one of the great things about being a writer—I have a viable outlet for crazy ideas. Like a mosh pit of the damned.

Here, we get to see the kinds of things Kitty does between books. I’m a little sad that Jax has never made an appearance in the novels. But he inhabits this story so well it seems to be where he’s meant to live.

“Kitty’s Zombie New Year” (Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Piece of My Heart”)

My big goal with this one was to insert zombies in the Kitty universe, and to do it my way. I’m not a fan of the brain-eating shambling undead zombies. It’s like the same joke over and over and over again. Yeah, I’m familiar with all the commentary, the metaphors of decay and violence, that it’s not really about the zombies but about the survivors and their relationships, and so on.

But let me tell you about the movie The Serpent and the Rainbow, based on the book by Wade Davis, and the real source of zombie stories and even the word “zombie”: Zombie-ism as a form of mind control and slavery, and the possible existence of a neurotoxin concoction that induces a coma and brain damage in its victims, used to create zombie slaves. Tell me that isn’t a million times creepier than the shambling brain-eaters.

“Life Is the Teacher” (Oingo Boingo, “Flesh ’n Blood”)

When I was invited to submit a story to the anthology Hotter Than Hell, edited by Kim Harrison, I knew I couldn’t write a Kitty story. The editor was looking for serious, sexually charged fiction, and that tone was all wrong for Kitty. I tossed around a few ideas and settled on writing about Emma and exploring what happened to her after the events of Kitty Goes to Washington.

I had two goals with this story. First, I wanted to delve a bit into how vampires and sex work in my universe. I also wanted to see if I could tell an erotic story in which the main character never actually takes off her clothes. Horror and erotica writing have a lot in common in that sometimes it’s what you don’t show that counts.

“You’re on the Air” (3 Doors Down, “Kryptonite”)

In Kitty and the Silver Bullet , Kitty gets a call from a vampire who’s had really bad luck. He didn’t want to be a vampire, he doesn’t have a Family to support him, and he’s stuck working the night shift at Speedy Mart. I really loved Jake and wanted to find out more about him, and moreover I wanted him to succeed. So here’s what happened after he hung up on the phone call with Kitty.

“Long Time Waiting” (Pink Floyd, “Wish You Were Here”)

You didn’t think Cormac was just sitting around twiddling his thumbs all that time he was off stage, did you?