The Vampires Of: Tanya Huff
By Jean Marie Ward
©Buzzy Multimedia

What do you get when you mix a tough former cop with Retinitis Pigmentosa, her ex-partner/ex-lover who’s still on the force, and the vampire bastard of Henry VIII? A romantic triangle potent enough to inspire a Lifetime Channel series called Blood Ties. But Tanya Huff’s six-volume Vicki Nelson series was only the beginning. Her Smoke Books, the second series featuring romance writing vampire Henry Fitzroy, has been optioned for television, too.

Buzzy: You’ve said-and you’ve said that other people have told you this-you’ve never met a genre you couldn’t skewer. How did you skewer the vampire genre?

Tanya Huff: Well, I wrote the Blood books [the Vicki Nelson series] specifically because I wanted a mortgage. I worked at Bakka Books, which is a science fiction and fantasy bookstore in Toronto, and I saw that vampire readers are extraordinarily loyal to their genre. They’ll buy anything with fangs on the cover in the desperate hope of getting a decent book. So I thought, well, if I write a good vampire book, I’ll have a built-in readership.

I wrote the first chapter-and what I was doing was writing a vampire book-and I gave it to my wife to read. She said, “You know, honey, I hate to say this, but it’s not very good. How about don’t write a vampire book, write a Tanya Huff book with a vampire in it?”

So that’s what I did instead. I stuck with some of the traditional vampire tropes-with the passing out at dawn-because part of the problem is when you have someone who is so powerful, you have to give them equivalent weaknesses in order to make them believable or it’s completely unbalanced. But I also had [Henry Fitzroy] riffing off Bram Stoker on you have to be invited in, because I had him say the line: “Bram Stoker was a hack.” Part of that is I was willing to bend the biology to fit, but I wouldn’t bend the laws of physics. You could still see his reflection in the mirror.

I think, mostly it was I didn’t treat it like a vampire book. I didn’t use the vampire book tropes; I just used my tropes. Henry [Fitzroy] isn’t even the main character in the book. Vicki is the main character. The emphasis is actually on her.
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