History Literature / TheOtherworld

** UsefulNotes/LizzieBorden is revealed in the book Haunted to have been possessed by the evil chaos demon known as the Nix when she was killing her father and stepmother. In the novel, Lizzie herself also appears to act as an information guide about the Nix the heroine Eve Levine is trying to capture and imprison.

* GoodPeopleHaveGoodSex: Paige and Lucas have a very active, fulfilling sex life, including teaching each other spells, so with some PowerPerversionPotential (see below) thrown in for good measure.
** Jaime and Jeremy as well, once they get together.

* HandOfGlory: In ''Dime Store Magic'', Kristof Nast tries to get custody of Savannah and plants a Hand of Glory on Paige's property to pressure her into giving in to him. When Savannah wants to use the Hand to sneak out of the house, Cortez says that the claims of turning a person {{invisible}} are just a myth and that all that it can do is prevent sleeping people from waking (and weakly at that).

** Pack wolves and mutts have this each other. Depending on the era and the Pack Alpha, it varies between the civilized Pack preventing the mutts from killing humans for fun, or the bully Pack murdering mutts for fun.

* GlowingEyesOfDoom: Indicative of DemonicPossession. The color indicates which level of demon is doing the possessing. When Karl is possessed by Lucifer, Savannah describes his eyes as "shimmering iridescent, with points of a thousand colors" rather than a single color.

* OurVampiresAreDifferent: Vampires can go out in the sun, have super fast healing. They must kill once a year to preserve their immortality. Vampires are not immortal per se, merely long lived. As they age the tend to get more and more disconnected from other people.
* OurWerewolvesAreDifferent: werewolves that turn into pure wolves at will, but the process is painful. They must Change about once a week, becoming more irritable and restless the longer they put it off, until finally their bodies take over and they Change involuntarily. Control over their Change is a matter of teaching, practice, and willpower. All but one of the werewolves are male, and they pass the gene down to their sons (daughters need not apply). A hereditary werewolf will not have his first Change until late adolescence. Werewolves can be made by an infected bite or by injection with werewolf saliva, but most are hereditary, because very few bitten werewolves survive the transition. ''Frostbitten'' also introduces a second completely separate type of werewolf in a LostWorld type scenario, in Alaska.

* GlowingEyesOfDoom: Indicative of DemonicPossession. The color indicates which level of demon is doing the possessing.

* DarkIsNotEvil: Eve learned dark magic so that she would be able to stand up to her enemies, making her and Paige NotSoDifferent.

* YourApprovalFillsMeWithShame: Clay has this reaction twice in ''Ascension'', mostly when Malcolm points out they're NotSoDifferent. Considering that Malcolm was an AxCrazy psychopath who very happily murdered non-Pack werewolves, including Karl Marsten's father, simply because they exist, can you blame him?

There are four books narrated by Elena Michaels, werewolf; two books narrated by Paige Winterbourne, witch; one book narrated by Eve Levine, witch/half-demon/ghost/[[spoiler:angel]]; one book narrated by Jaime Vegas, necromancer; one book narrated by Hope Adams, half-demon; three books narrated by Savannah Levine, witch; and one book narrated by multiple people. In addition there are many short stories and novellas in anthologies or on the author's website.

A television adaption, ''{{Series/Bitten}}'', was commissioned by the Canadian channel Space and stars Creator/LauraVandervoort as Elena. Internationally, it airs on Creator/{{Syfy}} in the United States.


Now has a Character Sheet that needs love

!!!Novels
# ''Bitten''
# ''Stolen''
# ''Dime Store Magic''
# ''Industrial Magic''
# ''Haunted''
# ''Broken''
# ''No Humans Involved''
# ''Personal Demon''
# ''Living with the Dead''
** ''Men of the Otherworld'' anthology
# ''Frostbitten''
** ''Tales of the Otherworld'' anthology
# ''Waking the Witch''
# ''Spellbound''
# ''Thirteen''

!!!This series provides examples of:
* AdoptivePeerParent: Paige adopts 13-year-old Savannah when she's 23 or so. This works out surprisingly well, as Paige is close enough in age to remember pulling exactly the same crap Savannah was pulling, and treats her with a light rein.
* AffablyEvil: Karl Marsten is a genunily charming and polite jewel thief and killer. Marsten is a sincerely gracious host even to his enemies, who he wines and dines in hopes of them taking the hint and leaving before he has to kill them. His genuine charm and affability even carry over into his eventual HeelFaceTurn.
* AllOfTheOtherReindeer: Paige was treated as a dangerous malcontent by the rest of her Coven, even before they cast her out (though here it was more a case of "Fire her before she quits").
* AllThereInTheManual: the author's webpage includes an "Otherworld Bible" with details about demonology not yet seen in the series
* AloofAlly: Elena throughout ''Bitten''. Just because she's helping the Pack doesn't mean she wants anything to do with them... [[spoiler:although she changes her mind and rejoins in the end.]]
* AndIMustScream: multiple examples.

** [[SerialKiller Thomas LeBlanc]], from ''Bitten'' is a psychotic murderer who preys on women and takes great delight in hunting and then raping and killing them. Thomas is such a raging psycho that he outright goes against the orders of his boss just to kill Elena.
** And then there's Jasper and Jason Haig, aka, Jaz and Sonny, who murder their ''entire gang'' and two of Lucas's older brothers and attempt to murder him and Paige as well, leaving the fourth brother, Carlos, to take the fall. Though, this is more a case of them being horribly indoctrinated by their mother, who was a paranoid schizophrenic and had delusions that the Cabals would come after her sons. Yes, she had good reason to worry, as they were a very rare type of supernatural and the Cabals are notorious for doing anything to get their hands on rare types, but still.

** Travis Tesler in ''Frostbitten'' - is a sadistic rapist and killer who has crossed the line as a "mutt" werewolf. He doesn't only kill people but eats them afterwards: with an attractive woman, the sequence is rape, kill, eat.
* BabyFactory: How werewolves view women. The Tesler brothers take it a stage further and view them as a nice snack afterwards.
* BerserkButton: multiple examples.

* BlessedWithSuck: multiple examples.
** Hope Adams. Unlike other [[HalfHumanHybrid half demons]] who get some cool power like Telekinesis, Hope has the demons' fascination with chaos, meaning she can sense chaotic thoughts or have visions of chaos but has no super powers to protect herself when she gets into a sticky situation.
** Jaime to a lesser extent, she tends to end up as the ButtMonkey as well because since her abilities are useless in combat. Also, necromancers usually go insane as they grow older.
** Clairvoyants, too. Their visions eventually drive them insane, and though they can spy on a subject using their remote viewing, they can't remote view other clairvoyants and their power is usually weak, lasting seconds at the most. Seers, though, have the worst of the lot. They are incredibly powerful clairvoyants, but they're all deformed, and two of the three known seers were also very mentally handicapped. The one who wasn't...[[AndIMustScream well...]]

* BullyingADragon: The Witches' treatment of Paige and Savannah, despite them both being stronger than many of them put together, and nowhere near as afraid to use their powers at high levels.
* ChronicHeroSyndrome: Paige and Lucas, so much.

* DemonicPossession: In ''No Humans Involved'' a demon takes control of a human; when the demon disappears, the host has no idea what happened to him. In the final novel ''13'' the veil between worlds is super thin making it super easy for demon lords to just possess people and go walkabout in their bodies which happens every couple chapters or so.
* DVDBonusContent: The author's website carries additional short stories and novellas set in the universe that provide background or additional adventures for many of the series characters.
* DominoRevelation: From witches to werewolves they all get introduced.
* ElderlyBlueHairedLady: It's a cliche of Paige's coven in ''Dime Store Magic''. Paige laments that there are far too many members of the coven that conform to said stereotype.

* FantasticRacism: multiple examples.
** Witches and sorcerers hate each other. Though there are historically valid reasons, it's probably time to get over it.
** Pack wolves and mutts towards each other. Depending on the era and the Pack Alpha, it varies between the civilized Pack preventing the mutts from killing and eating humans for fun, or the bully Pack murdering mutts for fun.
** A particularly unpleasant example involving Malcolm Danvers. He dislikes and is disdainful of his son Jeremy not only for his un-werewolf-like disinterest in fighting and bookishness, but also because Jeremy's mother was Japanese and [[spoiler:a rare type of supernatural race which Malcolm deemed strange and unnatural.]]
** In general the different races seem uncomfortable around werewolves and vampires, since they're less human like, and also more prone to feasting on humans.

* HandOfGlory: In ''Dime Store Magic'', Kristof Nast tries to get custody of Savannah and plants a Hand of Glory on Paige's property to pressure her into giving in to him. When Savannah wants to use the Hand to sneak out of house, Cortez says that the claims of turning a person {{invisible}} are just a myth and that all that it can do is prevent sleeping people from waking (and weakly at that).

* HugeGuyTinyGirl: Karl and Hope. He's tall, reasonably muscular, and a werewolf, so also an example of StrongerThanTheyLook. She's around 5' (1.5m) tall, and he's able to easily pick her up and carry her around.
* HuntingTheMostDangerousGame: In ''Stolen'', Elena and other supernaturals are kidnapped to be experimented on and the major funder of this project is a millionaire video game designer who likes to hunt them when they've outlived their usefulness.

* IJustWantToBeNormal: Elena keeps telling herself this throughout ''Bitten'', because she hasn't really accepted that she prefers being a werewolf and living in the pack.

** In ''Stolen'', [[spoiler:Sondra Bauer injects herself with Elena's saliva to turn herself into a werewolf. Unfortunately, she didn't listen to Elena's warnings ''at all'' and flies into an UnstoppableRage, during which she murders one of her friends. [[NeverMyFault Naturally, she blames it all on Elena]]. ]]
** Hope, who despite being a half demon has no useful abilities to protect herself when in danger, asks Karl to bite her so that she won’t have to rely on him for protection all the time. He refuses.

** Savannah/[[spoiler: Adam]]: Witch & Sorcerer/[[spoiler: Exustio Half-Demon]]

* LighterAndSofter: The author's ''Literature/DarkestPowers'' subseries. Though she did barely change it. The sex scenes become kissing scenes, and killing the bad guy becomes knocking the bad guy unconscious.

** All supernatural races have to hide themselves or face dire consequences. In Stolen we see some humans capturing supernaturals to study them and to play with their abilities.

* MayDecemberRomance: The only pairing in the series where the male is not at least a decade older than the female is Lucas/Paige, who are only two years apart. Karl is ''twenty-three'' years older than Hope, but since he's a werewolf, he ages slowly and doesn't look older than mid-thirties. This causes some confusion for Robyn in ''Living With The Dead'' when another werewolf continually refers to him as "the old man".

* NoPeriodsPeriod: Averted. A major plot thread in ''Dime Store Magic'' involves Savannah getting her first period which marks a huge gain in spellcasting power for witches.
* NoSocialSkills: Clayton Danvers, first and only child werewolf. He starts out barely surviving on his own before fellow werewolf Jeremy rescues him and teaches him how to pass in human society.
** Played with. Clay has a genius-level IQ (and the doctorate in anthropology to prove it. . . at the bottom of his sock drawer) and certainly knows how to blend in with humans. He just genuinely doesn't see the point 90% of the time, and typically only does so for Elena's sake. As he puts it, he absolutely ''has'' social skills, he just ''chooses'' not to use them most of the time.

* OneGenderRace: multiple examples.

** Werewolves are always male; the gene passes from father to son and Elena is the only known female werewolf to survive a bitten Change. Potentially averted by [[spoiler:Katie Danvers, a female werewolf born to Clayton and Elena.]] Only time will tell if she develops the abilities.

* OurWerewolvesAreDifferent: werewolves that turn into pure wolves at will, but the process is painful. They must Change about once a week, becoming more irritable and restless the longer they put it off, until finally their bodies take over and they Change involuntarily. Control over their Change is a matter of teaching, practice, and willpower. All but one of the werewolves are male, and they pass the gene down to their sons (daughters need not apply). A hereditary werewolf will not have his first Change until late adolescence. Werewolves can be made by an infected bite or by injection with werewolf saliva, but most are hereditary, because very few bitten werewolves survive the transition. ''Frostbitten'' [[spoiler:also introduces a second completely separate type of werewolf in a LostWorld type scenario, in Alaska.]]
* OurWitchesAreDifferent: Witches are a female OneGenderRace which are in contrast and often conflict with the all-male Sorcerers. Witches live in covens and only gain their full spellcasting potential via a ritual after they begin to menstruate.[[note]]And they only have until the witch's next period to perform the rite or they'll be forever locked into a lower power level[[/note]]

* ParentalAbandonment: Almost too many to list. Elena's parents were killed in a car accident when she was five. The full demon fathers of half-demons are never around. Though in ''Haunted'', it's implied that Balaam, Eve's father, keeps tabs on her. Supposed he "speaks very highly of [her]".

* PowerPerversionPotential: multiple examples.
** In ''Dime Store Magic'', Paige seduces Lucas by using spells to turn on the radio, light candles, caress him with wind, and most notably, use a modified fireball spell that apparently made her warm fingers particularly stimulating.
** ''Personal Demon'' shows us Hope, a chaos half-demon who gets a high off chaotic emotions and adrenaline. Karl arouses her by deliberately calling up memories of risky or chaotic situations and letting her feel his adrenaline rush.
** Adam is an Exustio fire half-demon and when he gets turned on, he can heat things up with his partner...literally. Although this only seems to happen between him and [[spoiler:Savannah.]]

** [[spoiler:Hope]] to a somewhat lesser extent in ''Spellbound'' and ''Thirteen.''

* RelationshipUpgrade: Often when TheyDo (sleep together, that is) for the first time, with the exception of [[spoiler:Hope and Karl]]. Theirs occurs after they work things out, sleep together for the second (and third and...) time, and start officially dating.

* SesquipedalianLoquaciousness: Lucas, oh my GOD.
* SequelHook: ''Waking The Witch'' - the most blatant one in the series so far

** Malcolm Danvers is one of the most sadistic werewolves in the series. Malcolm enjoys fighting and killing and is responsible for the deaths of many non-pack werewolves. His abused son, Jeremy had to cover for and hide Malcolm's crimes for awhile as if they came out to the rest of the pack it would lead to a deadly schism.
** Thomas [=LeBlanc=], from ''Bitten'' is a remorseless murderer and rapist of women driven by extreme misogyny.
** Edward Hagen is a vampire who starts to kill the children of the cabal members in retribution for his wife's death. Edward over the novel kills them through various means such as gunshots, strangling and fatal beatings.
** The Nix, from ''Haunted'' is a monstrous demidemon which possess women and helps them live out their murder fantasies with a special love for murdering children.
** Travis Tesler, from ''Frostbitten'' is a sadistic mutt werewolf with a love for raping and killing women. Tesla's sadism and inability to refrain from killing for fun means him and his brother need to constantly move from area to area to avoid the authorities.

* SpotTheImposter: Several times.

* StalkerWithACrush: Jaz becomes something like this for Hope. She had genuinely liked him, but upon and finding out that he and Sonny weren't the nice people she had thought they were, came to understandably dislike him. Jaz, meanwhile, is convinced that Hope really loves him despite what he did ([[spoiler: including trying to murder one of her friends right in front of her]]) and is just confused. Much to Karl's dismay, he is still obsessed with her a year later.
* StepfordSmiler: Jaime. Well, what's to be expected of a celebrity spiritualist who [[BlessedWithSuck actually ''can'' see ghosts]]?

* UntoUsASonAndDaughterAreBorn

** Werewolves can do so as well and the Pack werewolves are encouraged to do so. Although it's painful and unpleasant to look at as mentioned above.

* WorkingWithTheEx: In ''Bitten'', Elena has to work with the werewolf pack she used to be part of and runs into an ex-lover, Clay. [[spoiler: After a lot of BelligerentSexualTension they get back together.]]
* {{Youkai}}: The Kitsune type. In ''The Men of the Otherworld'' anthology we discover that [[spoiler: Jeremy's mother's race, the Kogitsune, were enslaved by the Kitsune]].

* OurWitchesAreDifferent: Witches are a female OneGenderRace which are in contrast and often conflict with the all-male Sorcerers. Witches live in covens and first gain their full spellcasting potential as a PubertySuperpower, a.k.a after they begin to menstruate.

** The 16th century noblewoman and SerialKiller Elizabeth Bathory was a prolific vampire who murdered hundreds of people in order to gain immortality before the story began.
** Gilles De Rais is depicted as a vicious SerialKiller and MadScientist who desires to take over the world.

''The Otherworld'' is an UrbanFantasy series by Kelley Armstrong, also marketed under the title ''Women of the Otherworld''. It's based on the idea that ThingsThatGoBumpInTheNight exist, but hide behind the {{Masquerade}} from humans. Each novel is narrated by one of a rotating cast of supernatural women. The plots of each novel typically include action, mystery, and romance in equal proportions. While the novels can be read alone, or in order of each narrator, minor jokes and plot details only make sense to those who have read the earlier novels.

** Travis Tesla, from ''Frostbitten'' is a sadistic mutt werewolf with a love for raping and killing women. Tesla's sadism and inability to refrain from killing for fun means him and his brother need to constantly move from area to area to avoid the authorities.

* IJustWantToBeSpecial: In ''Stolen'', [[spoiler:Sondra Bauer injects herself with Elena's saliva to turn herself into a werewolf. Unfortunately, she didn't listen to Elena's warnings ''at all'' and flies into an UnstoppableRage, during which she murders one of her friends. [[NeverMyFault Naturally, she blames it all on Elena]]. ]]

** ''Personal Demon'' shows us Hope, a chaos half-demon who gets a high off chaotic emotions and adrenaline. Karl arouses her by deliberating calling up memories of risky or chaotic situations and letting her feel his adrenaline rush.

* PayEvilUntoEvil: ''The Otherworld'' is a dark place with many horrific villains who do their evil deeds just because they like it. Hence the heroes will punish said villains often by killing them in ironic and brutal ways to fit their crimes with and example being Tyrone Winsloe who had supernaturals hunted down for fun. Elena and Clay force him to run his own hunting course and maul him to death in the same way he killed his victims.

** Malcolm Danvers is one of the most sadistic werewolves in the series. Malcolm enjoys fighting and killing and is responsible for the deaths of many non-pack werwolves. His abused son, Jeremy had to cover for and hide Malcolm's crimes for awihle as if they came out to the rest of the pack it would lead to a deadly schism.

** The Tesler brothers in ''Frostbitten'' - sadistic rapists and killers who have crossed the line as "mutt" werewolves. They not only kill people but eat them afterwards: with an attractive woman, the sequence is rape, kill, eat.

* WeddingDay: The short story "Wedding Bell Hell" details Paige and Lucas's.

* ArbitraryScepticism: In ''Personal Demon'' the main character, who is an empathic half-demon, whose mentor is a werewolf and is currently working for a sorcerer doesn't believe in goblins. Note however that the race of the guy who she says looks and acts like a goblin would if they existed is never specified. He might be another type of half-demon of which there are many.