Jamie's comments (member since Mar 22, 2008)

Jamie's comments from the Urban Fantasy group.

I highly recommend Tanya Huff's Blood series. The books are not sexually explicit, and while they do focus on his relationship with a woman, her very sexy vampire Henry Fitzroy is casually bisexual. Huff is a terrific writer, and her fiction is liberally sprinkled with gay and bisexual characters.

I prefer my vampires to be helpless during the daytime. Without that vulnerability, they're too powerful. And I like it when they can't eat anything except blood, because more than anything else, that sets them apart from humans. Tanya Huff's Henry Fitzroy is my ideal type of vampire.

I don't care if holy items or silver affect them or not, but I usually don't like the more traditional vampires who can turn into mist, and must sleep on dirt of their homeland, etc. But I do like P.N. Elrod's pretty traditional vampire, Jack Fleming.

It seems to be usually the romance vampires who barely qualify for the title: they aren't much harmed by the sun, and can eat whatever they want.

I like Charlie Huston's books very much, but you might want to be warned that they are very violent. They remind me of a Tarantino movie. And vampirism is given a scientfic cause, so they are just barely fantasy.

I like P.N. Elrod's Vampire Files series. They're set in prohibition-era Chicago, about a brand new vampire who becomes friends with a private detective. In the first book he's trying to solve the mystery of his own murder.

Tanya Huff's excellent Blood series has a female protagonist but they're told partially from two male points of view: that of Henry Fitzroy, a 400-yr-old vampire living in Toronto, and that of a human police detective. These aren't romance, but there is a very interesting love triangle in this series. And the spin-off series has a male protagonist.

You have a picture of Henry Fitzroy as the group icon, but you didn't list Tanya Huff's excellent Blood series.

I'll add a mention of P.N. Elrod's The Vampire Files - set in 1920's Chicago, with vampire detective Jack Fleming.