As a child, fantasy author Laurell K. Hamilton would try to write 'cosy' stories, but could only finish them by employing a technique she calls 'hack and slash'. It meant every character but the baby would die.
Hamilton's appetite for the macabre may stem from the influence of her Celtic grandmother, Laura Gentry, who ruled the roost after her mother died in a car crash in 1969. Instead of invoking the boogiemen when she was naughty, grandma would tell her to watch out for the Raw Head and Bloody Bones, Hamilton says, from her home in Missouri. The future writer was intrigued by the idea of this fairy-like water spirit that haunted pools and would pull under anyone who ventured too close to the edge.
What later encouraged Hamilton to write about fairies professionally was her feeling that nobody had portrayed them with conviction. 'I felt that they flinched,' she says. The 41-year- old says that, for example, they neglected to interview fairy contactees. Hamilton made the effort. She discovered that, for some reason, the fairies spotted today are tiny - much smaller than those recounted in Victorian tales - and look wispy and misty like ghosts.
Hamilton refuses to accept they are imaginary. She says she finds them as convincing as UFO sightings. 'I find it harder,' she says, 'to credit that it is all hallucination and all just made up if you go back and see the same thing again and again and again and again.'
Like her Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Series, her fairy foray, the Merry Gentry series, sells well. Her latest and third entry, Seduced by Moonlight, is in The New York Times best-seller list and opens beguilingly: 'A lot of people lounge by pools in LA, but few of them are truly immortal, no matter how hard they pretend with plastic surgery and exercise. Doyle was truly immortal and had been for over a thousand years.'
The secret of Doyle's longevity? That's right, he's a fairy but a tough example of the species. He operates as one of five fey bodyguards who serve the heroine, a fairy princess-cum-detective named Meredith Gentry.
Going easy on the private investigation, Meredith is meant to be trawling Los Angeles for a husband. The crux is that, if she produces a child before her cousin, Prince Cel, then her aunt, the Queen of Air and Darkness, will grant her the throne. Cue a succession of sexual encounters which highlight the athleticism of the winged hunks in question. The catch is that Prince Cel plans to kill Meredith and become top fairy himself by supplying an heir before she can deliver. Cue some ferocious scraps.
