Fans of the Kitty Norville series will find a comforting haven in Carrie Vaughn’s latest short story collection, Kitty’s Mix-Tape. Vaughn is a master at making the monstrous familiar, and even wryly funny. This is the 16th installment of the Kitty series, which began with Kitty and the Midnight Hour. What started as a fairly straightforward story about a plucky young werewolf named Kitty (get it?), has blossomed into a whole universe of characters, many of whom are revisited in this anthology. Vaughn also throws in some new settings for werewolf situations, such as a look into what a Pride and Prejudice-era werewolf might have looked like struggling to fit into society, as well as a few stories totally unrelated to the Kitty universe, like one about a half-selkie who visits Ireland in search of his roots.

Vaughn’s writing is for the most part contemplative rather than active – most of the stories in this collection end in conversation, not confrontation – but she’s a skilled writer and the real meat of each story is in the care she puts into character development, such as a simple blackjack dealer who can’t unsee what she sees when she notices a cheating gambler who’s winning without any of the usual tells, or in fact any visible tells at all. She follows the cheater and traces the deception back to its source – with the aid of magician Odysseus Grant, a supporting character from the Kitty series.

Most of the stories in the collection can be read as standalones even though the majority do stem from Kitty’s world. However, if you haven’t read the rest of the books yet, do yourself a favor and start with Kitty and the Midnight Hour. The 16-volume collection contains equal measures of page-turning action and relatively light fluff, making it a perfect pandemic binge read. One or two of the later books are kind of filler but it’s an overall satisfying series (it doesn’t go off the rails quite in the way that, for example, the Anita Blake series does). The collection provides some spoilers for the rest of the series, and why deny yourself the pleasure of starting at the beginning?

 

Kitty’s Mix-Tape was published October 2020. The Furious Gazelle received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.