Power of darkness, in a power suit

At one and the same time, we are assured that our map of the world is accurate and yet desperate to believe there is something more.

Alligators in the sewers, perhaps. Crashed spaceships secreted away by the government. Vast conspiracies of hidden societies, religious orders or old Ivy League schoolmates. Crop circles. Prophecies. Alien abductions.

Or vampires and faeries among us.

Even among its genre fellows -- crime, science fiction, fantasy and other such fiction -- horror is often perceived as a poor cousin, sent to its room when company comes. Those who possess no taste for stories of horror and the supernatural can only wonder and shake their heads.

Laurell K. Hamilton has given us 12 novels about sassy, sarcastic vampire killer Anita Blake: This series is a recent shoot off a tree whose earlier branches included works by Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, P.N. Elrod and Joss Whedon, part of an ongoing evolution in which the “super” in “supernatural” becomes something of a subscript.

In the works of these writers, vampires take meetings, the powers of darkness have corporate headquarters, demons go out with buddies for burgers and fries, and faeries give news conferences. “A Stroke of Midnight,” the fourth volume in a new series by Hamilton, begins just that matter-of-factly.

“I hate press conferences,” says Princess Meredith. “But I especially hate them when I’ve been ordered to hide large portions of the truth. The order had come from the Queen of Air and Darkness, ruler of the dark court of faerie. The Unseelie are not a power to be crossed, even if I was their very own faerie princess....

“Our court publicist, Madeline Phelps, pointed to the first reporter, and the questions began.”

The questions regard the latest in a string of attempts on Princess Meredith’s life that began in the first novel of the series, “A Kiss of Shadows,” and continued in “A Caress of Twilight” and “Seduced by Moonlight” as the two great sidhe, or faerie courts, vied for control.

The most recent assassination attempt, however, quite aside from leaving a sidhe and a journalist dead, was undertaken by a spellbound human policeman. So, for the first time, humans are allowed entry to the sithen, the “hollow hill” that is the Unseelie’s realm, while in Meredith and those about her, long-dormant powers have begun to awaken.

In the liveliness of Hamilton’s prose, in her feel for characters, in her play of anticipation and surprise, in the elegant way she folds the marvelous into the ordinary, she sometimes reminds me of past master Roger Zelazny (a high recommendation indeed), whose works include “Lord of Light,” “This Immortal” and “Creatures of Light and Darkness.”

I do confess to missing the wit and comedy of the Anita Blake novels. But such would be inappropriate in these altogether more serious books, and it’s forever gratifying to see a writer claiming new ground. The greatest struggle any artist faces, the gravity that binds the artist to his or her creativity, lies in refusing to do again what one already knows how to do, and has done.

With writers like Hamilton around, the horror novel -- like the world itself -- is not quite as we may have suspected. *