Caina & the Ghosts: your opinion needed!

After seven and a half years of marketing books, I’ve found that it works best when I can describe a book in a single phrase as “X meets Y”, where X and Y are both well-known movies or books or games.

For example, I’ve had great success describing FROSTBORN as “WARCRAFT meets THE LORD OF THE RINGS.” Now, if you’ve read the books, you know that isn’t strictly accurate, but it does give you a good thumbnail view of what the book would be about. And if you liked the Warcraft games and you enjoyed THE LORD OF THE RINGS, there’s at least a reasonably good chance you’re going to like FROSTBORN.

For CLOAK GAMES, I’ve had good luck describing it as “THE DRESDEN FILES meets SHADOWRUN.” I didn’t even know Shadowrun existed until after I wrote the ninth CLOAK GAMES book, but once it was pointed out to me, I saw the resemblance. Granted, CLOAK GAMES is only a little like THE DRESDEN FILES and a little like SHADOWRUN. (Unlike SHADOWRUN, there’s no cyberpunk element, probably because the Elves deliberately suppress both information technology and powerful corporations.) But in the “X meets Y” formula, THE DRESDEN FILES meets SHADOWRUN does a really good job of describing CLOAK GAMES in a snapshot.

That said, I’m not sure how to do an “X meets Y” formula for THE GHOSTS.

So, what is your opinion? If you were to make an “X meets Y” comparison for Caina’s books, what would you pick?

-JM