Bi Book Club: Dead Witch Walking

This review contains some minor spoilers.

In the world of The Hollows, author Kim Harrison constructs a richly detailed urban fantasy setting featuring ley line demons, corporate elves, and bisexual vampires all working at cross purposes to settle millennia-old feuds and contemporary crimes.

The series starts with Dead Witch Walking (2004), where, after a mutated virus decimated the human population, witches, vampires, and other formerly mythical creatures come out of the shadows and integrate with human society. Now making up a quarter of the population, they have to deal with the same corrupt cops, greedy politicians, and (possibly literally) soulless business tycoons as everybody else. It's a surprisingly prescient setting for our current reality all typed out like that, but don't worry, it's nowhere near as depressing.

Rachel, an earth witch and daughter of a cop, is discovering that she actually hates working for the magical police. The only catch is that once you sign up you can't leave — not unless you can afford to pay off the assassins they hire to kill departing members — and Rachel just doesn't have the money for that. Chance encounters lead Rachel, along with her chic bisexual vampire partner Ivy and their pixie Jax, to take the risk of quitting anyway and set up their own private investigation service out of an abandoned church. While Ivy could afford to buy Rachel’s way to safety, she doesn’t, forcing her to dodge government assassins on top of her other problems.

And Rachael has a lot of problems, from getting turned into a mink and being entered into an underground rodent fighting ring to inadvertently summoning a demon and freeing a centuries-old elven princess. Just as troublesome is her relationship with Ivy, who, despite their partnership, doesn't entirely like Rachel and is also powerfully afraid of her. As the story progresses, the two mend fences with one another, take on a billionaire drug lord, and manage to get enough leverage to escape the long reach of the magic cops for good.

In a refreshing departure from the urban fantasy cliché of dangerous and emotionally detached vampires or tough guy werewolves, Rachel's primary romance plot is funny and warm. Harrison writes her a clever, competent man who is also completely aware and utterly unphased by the fact that she out-powers him.

While the book, like the rest of the series, is a lot of fun, it's not all rainbows and unicorns. As much as Ivy is an interesting, complex, and sometimes relatable character, she's also something of a nightmare when it comes to depictions of bisexuality. Thanks to a troubled childhood and adolescence, Ivy is unable to separate her sex drive from her drive for prey, and the only way to disrupt her fatal feeding frenzies is for the situation to turn sexual.

Harrison takes the fun of “all vampires are bisexual” right back to its biphobic predatory origin with the unfortunate inclusion of childhood abuse as an instigating factor — something bigots have been pointing to as a cause of homosexuality and bisexuality for more than a century. Add to that the fact that Ivy is often pushy with Rachel about her feelings for her in later books, and the overall effect is very close to the classic example of the “bad bisexual.” It should be said that none of this is deliberate on Harrison's part, rather it seems to be the result of living in a culture that's still saturated in biphobic tropes and their opaque underpinnings. There's also a little bit of whorephobia in Rachel's inner monologue at the beginning of the book, and while it feels authentic in context, it's still uncomfortable to read.

Despite problems with the depiction of bisexuality, The Hollows series in general and Dead Witch Walking in particular make for a fun and fast read that features bisexuality and bi romances. Dead Witch Walking might not end with a bisexual awakening and Rachel sweeping Ivy off her feet, but their relationship is rewarding in its own way. After all, for many of us, the idea of a straight friend not running away after finding out their bi friend is into them is even more fantastical than anything involving witches and elves.