Nyx in the House of Night

editor who lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she shares a house with her husband and Catalina, a very beautiful and mischievous tortoiseshell cat. Catalina, they all agree, runs the house. Ellen has written essays in A New Dawn , Demigods and Monsters , and The World of the Golden Compass , as well as the novel A Rumor of Gems. She is currently working on the sequel to the novel as well as a young adult novel. The young adult novel is set in Tucson and involves teenage girls, horses, and several very tricksy cats.

{ Reimagining “Magic City” }
    HOW THE CASTS MYTHOLOGIZE TULSA

    Amy H. Sturgis
    MY OWN journey to the House of Night began with an email from my little sister, Margret. She explained that I should read—no, had to read—the novels by P.C. and Kristin Cast. While I appreciated her recommendation, I wasn’t exactly in the market for new titles to enjoy. My “to read” stack already was well out of hand.
    Then Margret changed my mind with one simple sentence: “The books are set in Tulsa.”
    The next thing I knew, I was reading the opening scene of the first book, in which a vampyre Tracker Marks Zoey Montgomery in the hall of her school and my alma mater, South Intermediate High School, in the Tulsa suburb of Broken Arrow. I was hooked.
    Of course, familiarity has its own charm. Like Zoey, I’ve shopped at Utica Square, trusted meteorologist Travis Meyer for the day’s weather forecast, and even taken a science class from Mr. Wise, and this helped me to feel an immediate identification with the young fledgling. As I’ve read the series, I’ve enjoyed many an inside joke that no doubt qualifies as a “Tulsa thing,” from the similarity between Aphrodite’s father, Mayor LaFont, and Tulsa’s former mayor, William “Bill” LaFortune, to the ever-present digs at Broken Arrow’s main rival, Union. (Go Tigers!) As someone who grew up in Tulsa but now lives many miles away, I’ve appreciated how the novels can be read together as one extended and creative love letter to my hometown.
    But the Casts have accomplished far more than giving former and current Tulsans a collective, cozy feeling of home. Certainly a number of contemporary series—including other young adult vampire series—use real-world locations for their settings. What sets the Casts’ House of Night novels apart is how the authors have harnessed the preexisting history and folklore of Tulsa, from its architecture to its ghost stories, to mythologize the town. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Tulsa was known as “Magic City” thanks to its oil boom and the immediate wealth it provided; today, P.C. and Kristin Cast have transformed Tulsa with their own equally rich form of magic.
    TULSA AS A CHARACTER
    In effect, the Casts make their reimagined Tulsa a character in its own right in the House of Night novels, and this marks their series as a contemporary example of a time-honored literary tradition: the Gothic romance. When Horace Walpole put ink to paper in 1764 and produced The Castle of Otranto , he created not only a genre, but also many of the rules it would follow, and soon the Gothic tradition that he pioneered gave birth to vampire fiction with works such as “The Vampyre” (1819) by John Polidori and “The Skeleton Count,” or “The Vampire Mistress” (1828) by Elizabeth Caroline Grey. As Jerrold E. Hogle points out in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction , Gothic works blur the line between the natural and the supernatural. They also deal with secrets (that are either physically or psychologically haunting), focus on the past (either the past in general or a personal, recent past), and remain deeply rooted in their geographical settings.
    As writers in the Gothic tradition, P.C. and Kristin Cast understand this well. They blur the line between the natural and supernatural routinely, as I first discovered when I read of a vampyre Tracker in my former high school. By steeping their novels in Tulsa and its folklore, the Casts also use local weather, tragic history, and notable landmarks in the city to evoke haunting secrets, provide a sense of the past, and allow readers to connect with their stories in a stirring, visceral way.
    Certainly the authors have used Tulsa’s local weather to powerful effect. Perhaps the most striking example of this is the ice storm that features heavily in the events of the fifth and sixth novels, Hunted and Tempted . In these books, the storm heightens the