71 Nightside

Ok, I couldn’t resist adding one of my favorite mass market fantasy authors. Some of you may know Mercedes Lackey for her High Fantasy Valdemar series, her fairy tale inspired 500 Kingdoms series, or her steampunk-esque Elemental Masters series. What you may not know is that, back in the nineties, she also wrote what I would argue is the first series to hit on the winning combo of mystery, supernatural heroine, gang of misfit assistants, and urban fantasy with her Diane Tregard series, a precursor to Anita Blake, Sookie Stackhouse, and Rachel Morgan. She only published three books and a couple of short stories (of which this is one) about this wildly popular character—but I guess that was part of the problem. In an interview, Lackey admitted that she put a stop to the series when she started to get crazy fans stalking her, wanting to know where all the vampires and monsters were in the cities, because they thought she was privy to some sort of dark knowledge about the REAL supernatural underworld. We should’t laugh. The natives on the Olympic Peninsula coast had to keep lovestruck Twihards from jumping off the cliffs out near Forks. See Instructor.