Elaine Howlin, on their eponymous site, enjoys Carrie Vaughn’s KITTY’S MIX-TAPE.

★★★★☆

I love how this short story collection has tie in songs for each story. It adds another layer to the story especially with the author’s notes included.

IN MY HUMBLE OPINION agrees.

KITTY’S MIX-TAPE is a delightful mix of vignettes featuring characters from the world of werewolf DJ Kitty Norville. I love this series and miss the characters so this was like a gift.

As does BOOKS OF MY HEART.

As a fan who has read every book in the Kitty Norville series, I enjoyed it.

Vaughn contributed to Mary Robinette Kowal’s MY FAVORITE BIT.

How do I pick a favorite bit from a book that builds on a fourteen novel series, a previous short story collection, and something like twenty years of dealing with these characters and their world?

Let me think about this a minute.

KITTY’S MIX-TAPE collects the short stories I’ve written set in the world of my Kitty Norville urban fantasy series since about 2010. Kitty is a werewolf who hosts a talk radio advice show for supernatural creatures, and she manages to get into a lot of adventures and trouble. I used short stories to explore the backgrounds of supporting characters and ideas that just didn’t fit in the novels.

The entire Kitty series riffs on tropes to one degree or another. Werewolf tropes, vampire tropes, talk radio tropes. Structural tropes, like a screwball comedy set in Las Vegas, or the cabin-in-the-woods horror story. If you want to know where I get my ideas, it’s often from just asking the question: what can I do with that trope? What spin, what ironic twist, what bit of commentary can I add to it? I get a lot of material out of asking those questions.

Paul Semel interviews the author.

Let’s start with some background. For people who haven’t read any of the Kitty Norville stories, who is Kitty, what does she do, and where does she live?

Kitty is a werewolf who hosts a talk radio advice show for supernatural creatures. Her adventures, based in Denver, Colorado, run for fourteen novels and a whole bunch of spin-off stories.

And then for those who have read those books, what is KITTY’S MIX-TAPE and how does it connect, both narratively and chronologically, to the other books in this series?

KITTY’S MIX-TAPE is a collection of short stories, most of which were previously published in magazines and anthologies, but it does have a few new stories. This includes most of the stories written since about 2010, while Kitty’s Greatest Hits [a previous collection of Kitty Norville short stories] includes stories written before then. They take place over a wide stretch of time, and are about many of the secondary characters in the series as well as Kitty herself.