Literature / Nightside

The Nightside. That square mile of Hell in the middle of the city, where it's always three AM. Where you can walk beside myths and drink with monsters. Where nothing is what it seems and everything is possible.

An Urban Fantasy series by Simon R. Green, the Nightside series chronicles the adventures of the mysterious John Taylor in the titular Nightside, a hidden world in the middle of London wherein all manner of nasties lurk. Fallen gods and Eldritch Abominations lurk down every dark alley in a place seemingly made entirely out of dark alleys. (And gaudy neon.)

John has a gift: using his Inner Eye, he can find anything. Lost artifacts, the mystical strings binding some otherworldly horror to reality, your missing keys, anything. Naturally, this gets him into all sorts of trouble.

The series spans twelve books, with John Taylor as the protagonist. The books are:

• Something from the Nightside (2003)
• Agents of Light and Darkness (2003)
• Nightingale's Lament (2004)
• Hex and the City (2005)
• Paths Not Taken (2005)
• Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth (2006)
• Hell to Pay (2007)
• The Unnatural Inquirer (2008)
• Just Another Judgement Day (2009)
• The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny (2010)
• A Hard Day's Knight (2011)
• The Bride Wore Black Leather (2012)
• Night Fall (2018)

A compilation of short stories from the same setting, Tales From The Nightside, was released in 2015.

Green's final Nightside novel, Night Fall, was released as a Doorstopper crossover with his Secret Histories series, and (barring future short stories) serves as a Grand Finale for both.

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This series contains examples of:

A-B

• Action Girl: Suzie Shooter, a/k/a Shotgun Suzie, a/k/a Oh Christ, It's Her, Run. Quite a lot of these actually, ranging from vicious villains like Belle and Bad Penny to militant heroines like Sister Josephine or Janissary Jane. Whether Ms. Fate qualifies is a matter of opinion.
• After the End: The extremely Bad Future John first visits via Timeslip in Something From The Nightside, and later spends several books working to avert.
• Air Hugging: Suzie and John are forced to do this for most of the series... until the end of book 9.
• The Alcatraz: Shadow Deep, the Nightside's penitentiary. We don't get to see it, but John can't help but shudder when it's mentioned. Though such is the nature of criminals in the Nightside that we hear about it more when someone breaks out (Notable exchange: "Why didn't he get the chair?" "He did. It didn't take."), so in a strange way it's going through its own Worf Effect.
• Alien Abduction: The Fortress, a heavily-armed and camera-monitored stronghold, was founded by abductees who are determined to kill the aliens if they ever come near them again.
• All Myths Are True: And they frequently stop in for a pint at the local watering hole.
• Alternate History: Loads of them, often as sources for characters who wander into the Nightside via Timeslips. A few characters (Count Video, the Jonah, Tommy Oblivion) have powers that allow them to select between alternative versions of reality and impose them upon their surroundings.
• Always a Bigger Fish: The time a predator disguised as a car tried to attack the limo John was riding in, only to get snatched up off the street by something even bigger and hungrier.
• Amusement Park of Doom: Nightside's Fun Faire. Because even the worst of humanity needs a place to be a kid again (bear in mind, the below quote describes the Faire before they discovered the place was haunted).
  ... the Dodgems of Doom could hit Mach 2 and came equipped with mounted machine-guns. The planes on the Tilt-A-Wheel had heat-seeking missiles and ejector seats. The Ghost Train was operated by real ghosts, the Tunnel of Love by a real succubus. The roller coaster guaranteed to rotate you through at last five different spatial dimensions or your money back. And the candy floss came treated with a hundred and one different psychotropic drugs.
• Anal Probing: A Grey seen lying in the gutter has a sign, "Will probe for food." Also referenced in relation to the Fortress.
• Angels, Devils and Squid. And Bugs. And Loa. And Fae. And Everything Else.
• Anti Anti Christ:
  • Merlin Satanspawn was born of the devil to be the Antichrist, but he "refused the honor." However his counterpart from Sinister Albion is a more conventional Antichrist.
  • Blind Pew suspected Taylor himself could be one of these. And John pretty much was, albeit by way of Lilith rather than Satan.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Creatures called "transient beings" can be found in the Nightside, including Lady Luck.
  • Gaea, a.k.a. Gayle, a.k.a. the Lady of the Lake
  • People could be forgiven for thinking John Taylor is this for Oh, Crap!.
• Arc Welding: The first myth arc is about avoiding the apocalypse. After that there doesn't seem to be a myth arc until in the last two books Walker reveals that he's been grooming John to take his place, and the latter half of the series was about establishing the newly independent Nightside, with John as it's guardian under the New Authorities. Also a form of Retcon.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: The Exiles are a group of nobles who wound up in the Nightside via Timeslips and now keep their own exclusive club, as they're the only ones who respect each others' titles. Not a one of them is portrayed as a nice person.
• Artifact of Doom: The Speaking Gun, an unholy weapon made from one of Lilith's ribs that can unmake anything in an instant. It does this by knowing the Word any given person or thing was created with (as in, in the Beginning there was the Word) and speaking it backwards. Described by all who touch it, or even look at it, as utterly reprehensible.
  • The second book had the Unholy Grail, the cup that Judas drank from. Everyone who's anyone is after this thing. Judas himself, the Wandering Jew who has been forgiven by Christ but can't forgive himself, breaks its curse by using it for Communion, turning it into an ugly bowl with no power.
  • Hinted at with Excalibur, but ultimately subverted. The weapon, though it has some power in the wrong person's hands, is ultimately a force for good and can only be wielded by those who are chosen by a world's Gaia, from who it derives. It's still a lot more than just a sword though. Specifically, it's a remnant of the Light, as in "Let there be Light".
  • Kayleigh's Eye, a powerful but unstable artifact so dangerous to its wielder that it's mostly used by fanatics to arm suicide bombers.
• Asshole Victim: Herne the Hunter and Lamentation, but it's unique in that we don't find out their backstories until a few books after. They totally deserved it though.
• The Atoner: Razor Eddie was stone-cold killer with a pearl-handled straight-edge razor when he was fourteen years old. He made a name for himself in a street gang war over turf and afterwards killed people for money or the notoriety or because he could. Then one day he went down the Street of Gods and an epiphany happened. He hasn't said what, but now Eddie sleeps in doorways and lives on handouts and kills people who think their position and power protects them from their crimes, as penance for his earlier crimes. He also has some feeling for the homeless, now that he is one, and anyone who means ill for the homeless will die in a spray of blood and body parts.
  • And the trope is invoked in the first Nightside book when Taylor talks about him some.
    "He's a killer," I said. "Razor Eddie. Punk God of the Straight Razor. These days he kills with good rather than bad intentions, but in the end all he is, is killing. And he wouldn't have it any other way. Hard to get close to a man like that. Someone who's gone much further into the dark than I ever have. But... he turned his life around, Joanna. Whatever epiphany he found on the Street of the Gods, he threw aside everything that had ever had power over him, in order to earn redemption. How can you not admire courage like that? If someone like him can change, there's hope for all of us.
  • Dead Boy is also obligated to do good deeds in hope that it'll let him rules-lawyer his way out of the deal he'd made. Subverted in that, while he goes through the motions, he doesn't actually seem to care much about making amends for anything: it's just a way for him to tally up some karma towards freeing himself, and to avoid boredom.
    • Also subverted in that he didn't really make such a deal at all; that's just what the person who reanimated him and meddled with his memories wanted him to think.
  • Subverted with Harry Fabulous, who claims he's trying to atone for his sleazy past, but seems to spend most of his time making equally-sleazy deals. He finally does some good in the final book Nightfall when he makes a deal with the Fallen Angel who cost him his soul and saves the lives of endangered civilians before dying. Much to the angel's disgust.
• Auction: The Batman Cold Open for Hex and the City opens with John at an auction for various supernatural-based items, where he's been hired to stand guard over a particular item - a butterfly that represents the ability to do a small change that butterflies into something massive.
• Babies Ever After: May soon apply to John and Suzie, after events of A Hard Day's Knight.
• Bad Future: John visits one of the worst via a Timeslip in the first novel, and spends several books to follow searching for the means to avert it.
  • And by "one of the worst", we mean "one so nasty that seeing it scares armies of sociopathic, genocidal elves out of a civil war, for fear they'll bring it about".
• Badass Boast: Plenty, but the Lord of Thorns takes the cake:
  I am the stone that breaks all hearts. I am the nails that bound the Christ to his cross. I am the arrow that pierced a King's eye. I am the necessary suffering that makes us all stronger. The cold, clear heart of the Nightside. It was given to me to have dominion over all who exist here, to protect the Nightside from itself. I maintain the Great Experiment, watching over it, and sitting in judgement on all who might seek to disrupt or tamper with its essential nature. I am the scalpel that cuts out infection, and the heartbreak that makes men wiser. I am the Lord of Thorns, and I know you all. Sinner, Pretty Poison, Madman, and John Taylor. Stand up. I've been waiting for you.
  • From the same book as the above, a kick-ass quadruple example:
  "What can you show us, you caged freak? I am Sinner, and I have known the secrets of the Pit."
  "I am Pretty Poison, a demon of the Inferno."
  "I'm Madman, and I have seen the Truth."
  "And I'm John Taylor, and you wouldn't believe the shit I've seen. So bring it on."
• Badass Longcoat: John never leaves home without his trusty white trench coat.
  • John's coat sometimes approaches the status of Companion Cube. At least, he often refers to feeding it or taking it for a walk.
  • And John doesn't have a monopoly on the trope. Razor Eddie and Dead Boy have their grey and purple coats respectively.
  • Hadleigh Oblivion's Badass Longcoat is so black that it seems to swallow up light.
  • The Sun King's signature longcoat merits its own title, the Coat of Vivid Colours.
  • Adrien Saint as the Walking Man wears a long Western-style duster.
• Badass Normal: The Coltranes don't use much magic, aside from the occasional protective circle, but they still toss Mexican wrestlers and unruly werewolves out of Strangefellows with casual ease. John's secretary Cathy has her moments too.
  • Ms. Fate kicks a fair amount of ass without any powers, just expert martial-arts training and a few silver-edged throwing stars.
  • Shotgun Suzie was this for years, before an emergency infusion of werewolf blood gave her an edge.
• Barred from the Afterlife: In Hex and the City, Sinner is an otherwise-good man who'd sold his soul to the Devil for true love. When he died and went to Hell, it was revealed to him that his "true love" was a succubus who'd only been pretending to care about him ... but he still loved her and was content with his end of the bargain, so much so that having him around subverted the basic premise of Hell. Rather than let a happy soul spoil the atmosphere of the place, the Devil kicked him out again, and Sinner wound up in the Nightside, back on Earth. Ultimately subverted when his and Pretty Poison's actions lead to her regaining her original identity as an angel, and they ascend into Heaven together.
• Bathroom Brawl: An assassin tries to attack John Taylor in a public washroom, assuming he'll be off-guard. The fight ends as quickly as it begins when John magically swaps the air in the assassin's lungs with the toilet water.
• Batman Cold Open: Almost all books after the first start with John doing a short case unrelated to the main plot for the first chapter, which gives John the chance to show off his talents and sometimes hang a Chekhov's Gun.
  • In The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny the "short case" actually lasts for over half of the book. A motif aside, it's still completely unconnected to the plot of thethis book.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Dr. Fell, a villain from The Good, The Bad And The Uncanny, started out as one of the Nightside's rogue vicars: preachers who come to the notorious Wretched Hive to save its sinners. Lampshaded by John, whose narrative points out that when religious idealists go bad, they tend to go really bad.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: The Batman Cold Open for Hex and the City opens with John at a supernatural auction, where he's been hired to stand guard over a particular item. While he's glancing at the other merchandise, he spots a yeti's-foot umbrella stand. Later, before the selling gets started, a pissed-off yeti stomps into the hall, marches up to the displays, scoops up the aforementioned umbrella stand, shoots a really nasty look at the auctioneers and everyone else, and stomps out with his prize. Nobody tries to stop him.
• The Blank: The Harrowing.
  • The worker-drones of Abomination, Inc. in "Sharper."
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Inherent in the Nightside; no residents are completely innocent. Our "heroes" include jaded detectives who are recovering addicts, mercenaries, and slasher film characters. They're only good guys because their enemies are even worse.
• Boy Band: The Bedlam Boys used to be one, until they got too old to be marketable and sold their talent to the Collector (who keeps it in a very small jar).
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: "...dowsing rods, pickled penis, dowsing rod made from a pickled penis..."
• Break Them by Talking: Pretty Poison, of all people, negates the temptress-assassin Bad Penny's hyper-seductive influence over John and his companions with a one word insult. Pretty Poison is a millennia-old succubus. The one word? "Amateur."
• Brick Joke: When Dead Boy is introduced in Nightingale's Lament, John snarkily muses about DB's futuristic car turning into a giant robot. Years later, when Dead Boy features in his own short story, it's revealed that the car does turn into a robot ... not a giant one, but a sex droid that's in love with Dead Boy.
  • Practically every other book, John expresses a wish that someone would hire him to find out why the Moon appears so much larger from the Nightside. In Bride, he finally receives a letter asking him to investigate just that ... but he can't take the case, because he's retiring from being a P.I. to be the new Walker.
• The Brigadier: General Condor is implied to have been this trope, back in his own future era. Too bad he's just a Wrong Genre Savvy Fish out of Temporal Water in the Nightside...
• Broken Bird: Suzie Shooter. In Paths Not Taken, John Taylor even refers to her as such.
• Brown Note: The singer Rossignol's performances tend to induce suicides.

C-D

• Came Back Wrong: Dead Boy was killed by muggers at the age of 17. He made a deal with something (he won't say exactly what) and came back for revenge, a spirit possessing his own body. Now, he's super strong, unkillable, and held together with staples and duct tape. The short story "How Do You Feel?" reveals that his patron, Mother Macabre, had him murdered and resurrected him the way he is now to use as a lab rat, altering his memories to believe he'd made a deal with the loa, Mistress Erzuile.
• Canon Discontinuity: New details are constantly being flung around, forgotten, called back, ignored, disproved, so on and so forth. Sometimes in the same book. The rules of Cool and Fun are in full effect and the series works best if you define its continuity with Broad Strokes.
  • But that does have the net effect of making it more important when continuity does play a role in things.
• The Cape: Julian Advent, particularly in his glory days as the Victorian Adventurer. Ms. Fate, the Nightside's own transvestite superhero. Chandra Singh, visiting monster-slaying holy warrior of India.
• Captain Ersatz: Julien Advent is Adam Adamant in all but name. To drive the point home, in one book he mentions having had a female companion named Juliet (Juliet Harmer played Georgina Jones) who runs a nightclub called Adamant.
  • Played with, in that it's tacitly implied that, in-Verse, the show was based on Julien rather than the other way around.
• Catchphrase: Plenty.
  • Business as usual, in the Nightside.
  • Improvise. Suddenly and messily and all over the place.
  • Can't take you anywhere...
  • ...and it was the easiest thing in the world to...
  • There's some shit up with which I will not put.
• Celibate Hero: For most of the series, both John and Suzy are this, enforced by Suzie's trauma. Somewhere between books 9 and 11, however, they get it on enough that Suzie has shown John some combat holds as foreplay, and she's now pregnant.
• Chekhov's Gun: In Unnatural Inquirer, and specifically that book's Batman Cold Open, Taylor sets out on a mission from Walker to hunt down a man using an artifact to mess with the Loa. Normally in situations where Walker gets involved, he takes whatever he's after... which is why no one remembers the Aquarius Key until John uses it against the Big Bad of the book.
  • The teddy bear that Taylor found for Jessica Sorrow in Agents is also the link that she and his other Enemies use to send attackers against him from the Bad Future.
• Chekhov M.I.A.: In Uncanny, at least two references to Excalibur are made by two different people. Taylor notes that no one has seen the sword since Arthurian times, and that even the Collector doesn't have it since he'd have gloated over it. Guess what shows up in the mail by the end?
  • John's mother. All he knows is she left his father, and when said father found out that she was something not human he basically drank himself to death. John has no idea who or what she is.
  • John mentions the possibility of finding Merlin's missing heart the first time Merlin appears in the series. Sure enough, he finds and later destroys the heart a few books later.
  • Part of why Larry Oblivion is angry at John, post-Lilith War, is because nobody ever found his brother Tommy's body. Guess who gets retrieved eventually...
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: John Taylor gets dragged into more crap than John McClane. But all of it is totally justified, because: a) his gift makes him so useful; b) of who his mother is; and c) he's considered by many to be a jerk, but ultimately the only person too cynical of power to use it when he gets it.
• Church Militant: The Salvation Army Sisterhood. At least, that's how they appear to outsiders.
  • You don't mess with the Little Sisters of the Immaculate Chainsaw.
• Clock of Power: Walker's pocket watch contains a portable Timeslip, a spacetime portal that lets him show up wherever he's needed, Just in Time. It's an impressive feat of Magitek even by the Nightside's standards.
• Code Name: Walker isn't his real name... which means John is the new Walker.
  • Probably only in theory, not practice, as John is already so infamous under his own name that calling him "Walker" would only diminish his intimidation-factor. Hadleigh Oblivion, Walker's predecessor, also used his own name and was famous in the Nightside before he took up the job. It's likely that this trope only applies if the Authorities' mouthpiece rises from obscurity to assume the role.
• Collector of the Strange: The Cardinal collects obscure religious bric-a-brac, the Museum of Unnatural History collects and displays all sorts of Nightside oddities, the Lamentation collects suicides and their means of death, Dead Boy collects the more exotic calibers of bullet he digs out of his cold flesh, and the Collector collects everything.
  • Although ironically the Collector is not The Collector. The one thing he, as a Misanthrope Supreme, has no interest in, is human beings.
• Compelling Voice: Walker's Voice cannot be denied by anyone. Rumor has it, he even made a corpse sit up on an autopsy table to answer his questions.
  • Less a rumor, more a "Must you keep bringing that up?"
  • See also: Tommy Oblivion. When confronted with an animated statue, he calmly debates it and convinces it that it can't exist. He's so good he can persuade the fabric of reality.
• Continuity Nod: Not as blatant as most of Green's Canon Welding, but in Unnatural Inquirer, Taylor's narration mentions how the failure of one of the Nightside's common Bigger on the Inside magical effects can cause buildings to collapse. This is exactly what happened in one of his Hawk & Fisher novels, when the titular cops busted a drug ring and the dealers let their space-expansion spell lapse to cover their tracks.
  • The revelation that the Sun King from Bride is likely to destroy the world if he makes the Sun rise there isn't as big of a surprise to anyone who's read Drinking Midnight Wine: a standalone novel of the Greenverse which reveals that the Sun itself is a villain in this Verse, although the latter isn't actually connected to the former.
• Cool Car: Dead Boy's self-driving, flamethrower-and-buzzsaw-armed car of the future. The Fatemobile, essentially the Batmobile in drag. Julien Advent's gorgeous white limo. For that matter, any vehicle that can hold its own in Nightside traffic probably has to qualify.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: The Cavendishes, Mr. Alexander, Jeremiah Griffin, Taffy Lewis.
• Cradling Your Kill: Walker does this when he murders his oldest friend, the Collector, in The Good, The Bad and The Uncanny.
• Crapsack World: The Nightside is a bad place. Until you visit Sinister Albion, where Merlin became the Antichrist. Then the Nightside really seems like a walk in the park.
  • The Bad Future that John spends the first half of the series trying to avert gives even Sinister Albion a run for its money in the Crapsack department.
• Crazy-Prepared: John has all sorts of useful trinkets and substances stuffed into the innumerable pockets of the aforementioned coat.
  • Although it might be surprising to some how often the solution to a problem can be found in the form of condiments.
  • Despite having Merlin as backup, Alex likes to solve his own problems. Given the bar's diverse clientele, he's got bouncers, magic spells, and even holy water on tap.
• Creepy Good: Razor Eddie, "Punk God of the Straight Razor", is described as "an extremely disturbing agent of good. The forces of good didn't get a say in the matter". Fair enough, since he's a reformed — but not retired — Serial Killer who targets those who threaten children and the homeless and has been known to leave buildings soaked in blood but conspicuously absent of corpses.
  • Hadleigh Oblivion is an upmarket version: a no-longer-all-that-human defender of Reality who sucks the life out of flowers and murderers. Even his own brothers find him creepy, which is saying a lot since one of them is a zombie.
• The Croc Is Ticking: Madman is surrounded by his own personal soundtrack, which is helpful in warning people to get the hell out of the insane Reality Warper's way.
• Cryptic Background Reference: All over the place.
• Dark Age of Supernames: Lots of minor characters, particularly villains, sport epithets that fit this trope.
  • So do a number of creepy supernatural weapons and locations, for that matter.
• Dead All Along: Pen Donavon from The Unnatural Inquirer, who had no idea because all memory of dying had been suppressed.
• Deadly Gaze: Lilith can destroy people utterly with just a glare, turning them into "agonized shadows" on the wall behind them. Her son is good at it too. Minus the whole blasting part
  • Probably a reference to how the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki burned shadows of people and objects into the concrete.
• Deadpan Snarker/World of Snark: Just about everyone gets in on the act at some point. Lampshade Hanging is a big hobby in the Nightside.
• Deal with the Devil: Sinner sold his soul for ten years of true love. When the time was up, Satan told him that his "true love" was actually a succubus who'd lied about loving him... but Sinner didn't care, because his love for her was real as far as he was concerned. And since he still loved her on being sent to Hell, they kicked him back out - the place was too nice while he was around.
  • Deconstructed with the Walking Man, a person who sells his soul to God. He has amazing power... as long as he never strays from God's path (beyond murder, at least; but he still can't have family or friends).
    • The Removal Man thought he'd done the same thing, but he'd actually been suckered by someone who definitely wasn't God.
  • Also, it's pretty much a given that you can deal with the devil in the Nightside. And worse. Dead Boy has dealt with the latter.
  • The Griffin plays this trope straight. Though the contract can be partly revised, if someone has enough connection to one side or the other....
• Demonic Possession: Technically, Merlin's possession of Alex Morrisey rates as Half-Demonic Possession, considering who Merlin's daddy is.
  • Played straight and inverted in Paths, when Taylor and Suzie allow angels to possess them, one evil and one good.
  • The Primal possess some cryogenically-preserved bodies from the Necropolis.
• De-power: John's ability lets him find the source of a person's power and remove it. He does this multiple times throughout the series, including to Belle in Agents of Light and Darkness, and later the Lamentation and Bad Penny in Hex and the City.
• Detonation Moon: In the Bad Future seen in the first book, the moon is gone. When he time-travels to said Bad Future in Sharper, John witnesses the Nightside's demise in transit, including how it shatters and rains down over the already-devastated city.
• Deus ex Machina: In Judgment Day, after making a bit of a mess on the Street of the Gods, the Walking Man comes into conflict with one Razor Eddie. Subverted in that, despite coming from nowhere, our hygienically-challenged friend only comes to a stand-still with the Wrath of God in question, and is ultimately beaten.
  • The return of King Arthur seems to be this at first, but once more is subverted - even he becomes more of a tool in John's hands.
  • The Speaking Gun tends to subvert this in its later appearances: when the good guys try to turn it on the villains, they realize it's too damned evil to use.
• Did You Just Have Tea With Cthulhu: Despite being the incarnation of Earth, Gayle is pretty downright affable for an Eldritch Abomination.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: John's Gift has helped him find the Achilles' Heel of a significant number of Eldritch Abominations over the years. He gives a few of them indigestion, as well. (Given who his mother is eventually revealed to be he's related to most of them, as he said in ''Judgment Day.)
  • Done with the Speaking Gun. Twice, as of Judgment Day though the second time it was done by God's Wrath Incarnate.
  • In the Batman Cold Open to A Hard Day's Knight, John realizes a bunch of Eldritch Abominations are trying to get into this universe using a human soul as a bomb. John weaponizes him, the pocket watch he took from Walker, and the Gateway they opened to send him a message and knocks their socks off.
  • John has a literal fistfight with (Kid) Cthulhu in Unnatural Inquirer. It didn't go well, as John is much better with his tricks and Gift than his fists.
• Different World, Different Movies: Regularly played with; many stores offer items from alternate histories. This includes alt-history media works, such as Beatles rap albums, pornographic versions of Agatha Christie mysteries, and Orson Welles' Batman epic Citizen Wayne. Another story mentions a film titled Cassablanca, starring Ronald Reagan and Boris Karloff, and the Stephanie King romance novel Hearts in Atlanta.
  • The Mammon Emporium's specialty is chain stores and fast food from alternate realities, like a McDonalds-Expy specializing in dolphinburgers.
• Disney Villain Death: Walker and John's final battle in The Good, the Bad and the Uncanny ends this way, with Walker falling into the pit left when Satan came to claim Griffin Hall in Hell To Pay.
• Divine Parentage: A few divine-blooded characters, like Jimmy Thunder (a descendent of Thor) turn up, usually as faces in the crowd at gatherings of immortals.
• Doesn't Like Guns: John never carries a gun. He usually doesn't need one, and when he does, Suzie carries enough for both of them.
  • Heck, Suzie carries enough for the SAS.
  • Fully justified in the form of the Speaking Gun, which is said to effectively damn the user if they ever pull the trigger, and makes people feel dirty by just touching it.
  • "I don't like guns. They make it too easy to make the kind of mistakes you can't put right by saying 'Sorry' afterwards. Besides I never felt the need."
  • John invokes this at least Once an Episode, often when someone points one at him at close range. He then opens his hands the and bullets fall out. "Your gun is empty."
• Drowning My Sorrows: John was reduced to drinking by his sojourn in London Proper, and had previously become a drug addict in the Nightside before Razor Eddie dragged him back from the brink. After Camelot's fall, Merlin retreats to the bar that would become Strangefellows and drinks himself into a stupor.
• Duck Season, Rabbit Season: How John tricks a simulacrum door into telling him the password it's been demanding before it'll open.

E-H

• Early-Bird Cameo: Possibly Joan Taylor and Stephen Shooter, if the cross-sex reflections John and Suzie see in Old Father Time's mirrors in Paths Not Taken were the same alternate versions of themselves that they meet several books later.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Rossignol invokes this trope on-stage. Lilith's manifested body is so monochrome that she looks like she walked out of a black-and-white movie.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Nightside has these galore. For the most part, though, they've all got glass jaws, at least when John Taylor gets involved, subverting the usual "cosmic horror" that you see in Lovecraftian fiction. On the other hand, these things are the bottom feeders of the Cosmic Horror food chain.
  • Bride brings in a few more - the inhabitants of Ward 12A are there due to interference by such beings, including potential gateways outside. Also, the force behind the Sun King, the Aquarians, are similar beings.
• "End of the World" Special: Subverted in Sharper. Lilith attempts to pull this off, but is stopped by her son and the men who brought her into the world.
• Entropy and Chaos Magic: Magic that influences probability comes up a lot. In the third book there's a Butterfly of Doom that lets the holder use this. Later on, a man gets haunted by his own alternate selves, who want him to become them.
  It suddenly all made perfect sense: you do a bunch of crazy evil magic in a room and you get a crazy, evil room.
• Evil Is Visceral: In Something From The Nightside, the Big Bad turns out to be a house on the outside but all squidgy and organic on the inside. Also, the Speaking Gun is a totally malicious Omnicidal Maniac artifact, and it's made out of meat. The room where the monstrously-altered Sylvia Sin preyed on her lovers takes on the qualities of a womb.
• Evil Weapon: The Speaking Gun whispers in the hands of anyone who holds it, wanting them to use it. Only a few have the power not to: Father Time, Suzy, and John. And both of the last two have tried to. Even Razor Eddie gave in, though he eventually overcame the compulsion. And Took a Level in Badass as a result.
• Exactly Exty Years Ago: Taylor keeps track of Eamonn Mitchell's various versions in Paths Not Taken by guessing at their ages, then tagging them "Eamonn 20", "Eamonn 40", etc.
• Expy: The Walking Man is almost a perfect copy of the Saint of Killers.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Razor Eddie's awful fate in the Bad Future, made still more horrible because he's a god, so it can't actually kill him to have untold generations of insect larvae eat their way out of him.
• The Fair Folk: And the only reason they don't show up more often is because they really dislike humans. The feeling is decidedly mutual.
• Fantastic Drug: All over the place. Revert sends you back up the evolutionary ladder, Martian red weed is available for smoking, and Dr. Jekyll's formula is on the market for recreational use.
• Fantastic Firearms: The Speaking Gun, an utterly evil, immortal-slaying Artifact of Doom made from Lilith's flesh and bone. Instead of firing, it speaks its target's True Name backwards, un-creating it.
• Fantastic Ghetto: Many of the down-and-out former Powers live in Rat's Alley. John himself lived there for the time as a "guest" of perennial resident Razor Eddie. The Street of Gods can also count depending on which bit you're in.
  • Authority-figures like Walker tend to think of the entire Nightside as this, segregating the depraved and the supernatural away from the mundane world.
• Fantastic Noir: Probably the most succinct description for the series. One reviewer described the first two books as "what Sam Spade novels would look like if they were written by Rod Serling."
• Fantastic Racism: Elves. When one mentions to John that he has social/mental traits that would make him a good elf, he responds with "Now you're just being nasty."
  • It's mentioned that smoking Martian Red Weed too much turns one into a Martian. Upon such event, the person in question is killed "on general principle." According to Walker in his Secret Histories cameo, the unfortunate may also be served as dinner.
  • John himself is tempted to kick the crap out of a down-and-out Grey alien, for being an abducting little bastard.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Let's see, we have time travel, Arthurian legend, aliens, gods, angels, vampires, werewolves, mummies, demons, Frankenstein, the Fae, zombies, robots, alternate dimensions, Dracula, ghosts, Jekyll and Hyde, succubi, Biblical mythology, sentient cars, talking horses, and Doctor Who references, amongst other things. Then again, that's part of the point of the Nightside.
• Fantasy Pantheon: The Street of the Gods is full of more religions than Vegas. And goes through them more quickly than a tourist goes through money.
• First-Person Smartass: And how!
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Julien Advent, General Condor, Queen Helena, and pretty much anybody else who's been marooned in the Nightside via Timeslip. Common enough that the Time Tower has a waiting room for people seeking Old Father Time's help getting home, and it's pretty crowded.
• Flaying Alive: Count Video apparently pissed off the angels pretty badly in Agents, because he's seen chasing his own flayed-off skin through the burning streets. In all his later appearances his skin's been stitched back on.
  • Eddie threatens to do this to a pushy Kali-worshipper in "Razor Eddie's Big Night Out", but refrains because the kindly priest who's Eddie's Morality Pet discourages him. He slices all the guy's clothes off, then circumcises him with a flick of his straight razor, instead.
• Foreshadowing: In Nightingale's Lament, John mentions that the Authorities will be arriving soon, just seconds before Julien Advent bursts into the room. Guess who becomes spokesman for the New Authorities several books later?
  • In Hell To Pay, the Lord of Thorns mentions how John's companions are nearly unique in that it's been given to them to choose their own destinies. Fridge Logic suggests that this hints at how Pretty Poison, no less than her mortal companions, has hope of redemption. Sure enough, her choosing to die for Sinner's sake transforms her from demon to holy angel.
• For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: Rossignol, a popular new singer, goes completely unnoticed by her fans when she visits Divas!, a theme bar full of drag queens dressed as their favorite lady singers.
  • The Demon Lordz are a street gang whose "colors" incorporate cheesy strap-on devil horns. They're also actual (minor) demons hanging out in the Nightside to enjoy the exotic pleasures of the material world ("Coffee! Ice cream! Cold showers!") unavailable in Hell.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: The whole myth of Lilith, not to mention her, is believed to take this trope.
• Freudian Excuse: Suzie is a Trigger-Happy Psycho for Hire who Hates Being Touched because her brother started raping her when she was eleven. She got pregnant at thirteen, and when she finally got up the nerve to tell her parents, they blamed her for "seducing him," and because she'd waited so long the abortion was one of those Body Horror-tastic late-term ones. After that, it's not really much of a surprise that she got herself a gun, shot him in the face, and ran away to the Nightside to kill people and never looked back.
• Freudian Threat: As a variant on his usual find-your-internal-organs threat, John once warned off a band of hostile mercenaries by offering to do a trick involving "your testicles and a bucket".
• Fusion Dance: The Lamentation is strongly implied to be the product of this trope, which afflicts a pair of minor villains from Paths Not Taken in karmic payback for their misdeeds.
• Gigantic Moon: The moon looks a lot bigger than it usually does, for reasons unknown. John remarks, on more than one occasion, on his hope that someone will hire him to find out why the moon is so close and what the hell is wrong with it.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom/Glowing Eyelights of Undeath: Merlin Satanspawn has empty eye sockets filled with flames. He's the Devil's son, and every time these eyes are mentioned it's commented that "he has his father's eyes". He's first met after his death, possessing his descendant, but when his live version is encountered (while time traveling to the era of Arthurian Legend in Paths Not Taken) he already has the freaky flaming eye-sockets.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly The Street of Gods runs on this. If enough people believe in something, it's true. Gods gain strength from the belief. The short story "Razor Eddie's Big Night Out" offers this to make an Oh, Crap! moment on the reader. Razor Eddie—who found a reporter trying to investigate the homeless to write schadenfreude stories of the formerly powerful now on the streets and mailed him back to the paper's office in forty-seven packages with postage pending on each one—Razor Eddie, who makes it a point to kill the rich and powerful (and in the Nightside, that's exceedingly so) who think their position means they won't ever pay for their wrongdoings (again, in the Nightside, it can be a lot)—Razor Eddie, who was infamous when he was 14 years old—Razor Eddie draws his power from the belief in him and what he does, and every time he does something spectacular and the stories spread, his power grows. The beings on the Street of Gods are afraid of him because they believe in the Punk God of the Straight Razor, too, and they know it.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: The appropriately-named Madman is a scientist who went bonkers after catching a glimpse of the true nature of the universe. He ultimately cures it by forcing the world to be what he wants it to be for a moment.
  • Some people in the Nightside seem to RUN on this trope... the Deep School that Hadleigh Oblivion trained in seems to have this as a graduation requirement.
• Good-Guy Bar: Strangefellows... for a somewhat strained definition of "good". It's where John prefers to drink, anyway. There's also the Hawk's Wind Bar and Grille, where John goes when he feels nostalgic for the sixties.
• Groin Attack: Used in practically every novel, and a routine part of the service whenever Lucy and Betty Coltrane toss a male troublemaker out of Strangefellows.
  • Usually indicative of the no-holds-barred brutality of combat in Green's novels, although one book also has a comedy version involving a mousetrap.
  • People getting kicked, not merely struck, in the nuts is practically a Running Gag in Sharper.
• Half-Human Hybrid: John, in a manner of speaking. He looks perfectly human, but his mother is... not. Of course, his appearance (and relative lack of power, compared to some of his siblings) is part of her plan.
  • Ironically, if his mother had stuck around with Adam, ALL humans might well be as powerful as him.
  • Bettie Devine from Inquirer claims to be the daughter of a groupie succubus and one of the Rolling Stones.
• Hardboiled Detective: John is pretty cynical and is a detective specializing in finding lost property. It might have something to do with the Nightside drawing in archetypical characters.
• Hates Being Touched: Suzie, due to an unfortunate childhood.
• Headless Horseman: Headless bikers and bounty hunters are not-uncommon sights in the Nightside. Considering that aliens, werewolves, superheroes, demons, ninjas, and cyborgs from the future are also not-uncommon sights in the Nightside, the occasional headless dude doesn't attract any particular attention.
• Healing Factor: Sinner, which makes him a good man to hide behind in a firefight.
  • Werewolf blood can endow an otherwise-normal human with this quality also, even third-hand as when Belle obtained it from a werewolf she skinned, Suzie was saved by the same skin, and Suzie's blood saved John in turn. The short story "The Big Game" reveals that such borrowed regenerative capabilities do wear off eventually.
  • Just Another Judgment Day reveals that Razor Eddie has one, after he gets beaten to near-death by the Walking Man.
• The Hero: Julien Advent, Chandra Singh
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: All the time, often with a little help from John to turn the villains' tools against them.
• Human Architecture Horror: Sinister Albion is an Elseworld where Merlin accepted his role as The Antichrist and corrupted King Arthur. Camelot is extensively decorated with undying human remains — impaled, splayed out over the walls, or simply immured — to drive the locals to despair and to satisfy Merlin's love of screaming.
• Humanoid Abomination: Lilith takes a mortal form, though it's quite clearly stated that this is more a concession to reality and necessary to her plans than the actual truth. John Taylor also appears to be one, as he can quite easily scare people with the barest sliver of his power. When he turns it up to eleven, you realize that he could quite possibly destroy the whole world if he set his mind to finding the way to do it.
  • Several lesser examples occur throughout the series, such as the Primal-possessed corpsicles, Kid Cthulhu, or the hermaphroditic being crafted by an alternate Baron Frankenstein.

I-M

• I Drank WHAT?!: One Running Gag of the series is for Alex to offer a beverage called "Angel's Urine" to the unsuspecting. Sales declined after word got out that it's Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • Likewise, Taylor had to stop eating Pork Balls when he found out that they're Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Which doesn't stop him from getting Harry Fabulous to (unwittingly) consume Pork Balls with an Angel's Urine chaser...
• I Know Your True Name: The Lord of Thorns possessed knowledge of the true names of both angels and demons, which accounts for how well he fought back against the invading angels. The Speaking Gun operates by speaking the true name of whatever it's fired at backwards, thus un-creating in.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Some passing references to "long pig" franchises suggest this is yet another of the Nightside's sick forms of self-indulgence. A few of the nastier Players are rumored to have eaten their enemies, and Taylor claims the denizens of Rat's Alley did the same to some thugs who tried to kidnap Sister Morphine. Averted by John's Enemies in the Bad Future, but only because there are so many dead monsters lying around to butcher and they have a different use (creating more Harrowing) for human corpses.
• Immortality Immorality: When Walker is dying, John asks if no one can do anything. Walker says there probably IS someone who can help, but he doesn't want to pay the price. Because in the Nightside, everything has one. And it's often your soul (or someone else's).
  • Subverted with Sinner; he's immortal because, despite selling his soul, he still managed to feel love in Hell. And so they kicked him out.
  • The Griffin openly admits to having played this trope straight for centuries.
• Immortality Inducer: Borealis Accelerator. A honest-to-god immortality serum. "One sip, and you'll live forever. ^note You'll be a frog, but you'll live forever."
  • The rumor of an effective immortality serum is what lures John to the Ball of Forever.
• Implacable Man: The Harrowing, faceless constructs that relentlessly pursue John.
  • Also the Walking Man, from Just Another Judgement Day, who has been charged by God to punish the guilty. One of his stops while in the Nightside is the Street of the Gods. Guess what happens.
  • Sinner, from book 4. It takes the crossfire from a dozen or so combat wizards to finally bring him down.
  • Razor Eddie. Who stood up to the Walking Man, and only was defeated when the latter took his razor from his hand, psychically shocking Eddie. Other than that, the best you can hope to do if he's after you is delay Eddie while you pray for a less horrifying end than at his hands.
  • Likewise, the Walking Man is the very embodiment of this, to the point that it even comes as part of his legend; "No door can keep him out, no argument can turn him aside, and nothing in science and sorcery can stop him." A good portion of Just Another Judgment Day boils down to several people trying to stop through increasingly drastic means and failing catastrophically.
• Implied Death Threat: John's favorite is to threaten to "find" an enemy's internal organs. He never actually does so in the series, but he isn't above non-fatally taking the air out of somebody's lungs or putting water into them.
• Involuntary Shapeshifter: Details of Bettie Devine's physical appearance, clothing included, are constantly changing due to her half-demon nature. It doesn't seem to bother her in the slightest.
• Joke Name Tag: A talking cartoon penguin working as a waiter has a name tag reading: "Hi, my name is: Piss Off, Tourist!"
• Karma Houdini: At the end of Bride, the Sun King reverts to a normal man and is apparently forgiven by John, Julien, his former lover, and even God for his crimes. His claim to have killed innocent people in the hospital, merely because they were too ugly for the remade world he'd intended to build, is conveniently unmentioned, even to wave it off as a ruse or the Entities' doing.
• Kid from the Future: At the beginning of Night Fall, a young man who calls himself Henry and addresses John as Father time-travels into Strangefellows to kill him, as the Bad Future has not been averted, and he holds John responsible. However at the end of the book, "Henry" turns out to have been Puck under a glamour, and the baby is a girl, so if John ever has a son he's unlikely to turn out like that.
• Last of His Kind: Alex Morrisey is the last member of his genetic line, which forces him to remain at Strangefellows because his family is pact-bound to the bar. Until Merlin dies, that is. Then he can finally venture out.
  • Bride reveals that King of Skin was one of the family of Immortals, which suggests the version of him John encounters in the Dark Future was probably the last surviving member of that family.
• Legacy Character: Mother Macabre, in the short story "How Do You Feel?"
• Lethal Harmless Powers: Finding things. As mentioned above, this includes not only missing objects and missing persons, but the root of an Eldritch Abomination's power, security codes to get into a vault, the bullets that were in your gun (something John practically uses as a party trick), magical paths between realities, and your favorite internal organs.
• Let's You and Him Fight: The Walking Man vs the Punk God of the Straight Razor.
  • This exact wording has been used to refer to Walker, who has stated in another series that he calls in help and then strolls up to take the credit.
    • Although he doesn't always need anyone's help to accomplish this, as he's been seen setting potential troublemakers at each other's throats with a well-timed mild comment or two.
  • When the living Merlin shows up from Sinister Albion, Alex freaks out, thinking no one and nothing can take him on. Off the top of his head, John spouts off three names that he's dealt with in the past. Subverted, of course, since John proves he's as big a badass as any of them.
  • In Bride, the Sun King pulls this trope on Taylor himself, convincing nearly everyone he knows that he murdered Julien Advent and setting the likes of Razor Eddie, Dead Boy, and the Oblivion brothers on his throat.
  • And back in Agents, John pulls it on the rival angelic armies when they abduct his spirit to bully him into working for them. John gets the heavenly and infernal angels squabbling, then slips back to his body while they're starting in on one another.
  • John pulled this trick AGAIN in Inquirer, this time on the Exiles and Taffy's thugs.
  • In Night Fall, the entire Droods vs Nightside war was set up by Puck, who took advantage of the longstanding animosity and revulsion the orderly Droods feel for the chaotic Nightside in order to get everyone who could stop him from taking the place over as King to conveniently kill each other off. Unfortunately for him, he was up against John Taylor and Eddie Drood.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: The Dragon's Mouth is a drug den that pretty much never lets go of anyone it brings in. Except John Taylor, and he was pulled out by the Punk God of the Straight Razor.
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover / Canon Welding: The Nightside is explicitly in the same universe as Shadows Fall and Drinking Midnight Wine, and there have been cameos from those books. In From Hell With Love Methuselah was in the Nightside during the events of Agents of Light and Darkness and steals an angel's hand, then makes it into a Hand of Glory. The Street of Gods first appeared in the quasi-medieval Hawk & Fisher series, which is a spinoff of Forest Kingdom, and Forest Kingdom #4 (Beyond the Blue Moon) gave us the Walking Man. Haceldama from the Deathstalker space opera crops up as a possible subway destination, as does Shadows Fall. As of Daemons are Forever, his Secret Histories series also, officially, crosses over with his Deathstalker series, when Edwin enlists Giles Deathstalker for help. A certain down-on-his-luck detective, whom Edwin won his houseboat from in a poker game, is also mentioned in "The Man with the Golden Torc" and Walker is a major character in "The Spy Who Haunted Me".
  • In a short story published in Unusual Suspects, the two main characters throw out names of potential suspects for the serial killings; the Bloody Man, Arnold Drood, is mentioned, but then excluded because his family already took him out (specifically, Eddie Drood took care of him).
  • In a "blink and you'll miss it" moment, in Agents, Taylor mentions some of the texts in the Vatican library, including the Testament of Grendel Rex. Grendel Rex is actually a Drood turned into a self-proclaimed god now buried in Siberia.
  • In Secret Histories, we find out that Mab has returned from Hell to reclaim her throne. How'd she get there? Larry Oblivion released her unintentionally, during the same adventure in which he got his wand.
  • In Just Another Judgment Day, there are two small ones. The Walking Man references the Droods when grimacing that he thought the Speaking Gun had already been destroyed, and it is explicitly stated that Owen Deathstalker is a member of the adventurers club.
  • Knight reminds us how connected everything is... Every. Other. Page. The Droods get at least a half dozen references, the state of the Elves seen in that series is shown and resolved, and Hawk and Fisher themselves make a cameo appearance at Strangefellows.
  • Bride doesn't let the trend die, especially in the Batman Cold Open, wherein we meet the Bride and Springheel Jack from From Hell With Love, as well as one of the last Immortals. Turns out that he was there to kill his distant, half-immortal relative, the King of Skin. He also drops the bomb that the Droods are dead, except for Eddie. Also, the Carnacki Institute gets a couple mentions, with one of their ex- (and possibly excommunicated) employees, and John mentioning that he picked up a few tricks from Carnacki himself.
    • To be fair, Taylor'd mentioned how he'd been Carnacki's apprentice long before Green's Ghost Finders novels got started.
• Meaningful Name: Prometheus Power Plant - it's run off of a scion of a major figure of light, murdered on his wedding day.
• Mirror Morality Machine: Not a machine, but a blast of change energy from Count Video caused Mr. Alexander's Heel–Face Turn in the Batman Cold Open of Paths Not Taken.
• Mother of a Thousand Young: Lilith commands a huge brood of her own half-demon descendants, which Suzie and John do battle with in Paths. By John's day, all but four of her offspring are long dead, although Lilith still has thousands of monstrous grandkids to do her bidding in Sharper.
• Most Common Superpower: Ms. Fate, the Nightside's transvestite superheroine, emulates this trope with a high-grade set of falsies.
  • Played straight when John, Tommy Oblivion, and Suzie see Alternate Universe versions of themselves in Old Father Time's mirrors, including themselves as a trio of supers. Suzie can't believe how gigantic her alternate self's boobs are.
• Mundane Fantastic: Living in the Nightside is pretty much this.

N-R

• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Shotgun Suzie (aka Oh Shit it's Her RUN), Razor Eddie (Punk God of the Straight Razor), Pretty Poison, Sinner, Madman, the Lord of Thorns...the list goes on (and that's just the good guys!).
  • In-universe Example - John Taylor. Seems innocuous enough, right? Yeah, right up until he removes the bullets from your gun with no visible effort and states that he can do the same to your organs. Considering he can take the air out of your lungs AND focus on dental work, it isn't a stretch to say he's right on that.
  • Other IU Examples: Walker, the Walking Man, and the Griffin.
    • And Jessica Sorrow the Unbeliever
  • Even Taylor has this reaction when Larry tells him that Hadleigh Oblivion may be taking an interest in something.
• Nemean Skinning: Belle from the second novel wore a werewolf pelt this way, still alive and bonded to her flesh to endow her with its Healing Factor.
• The Night That Never Ends: The name "Nightside" isn't metaphorical; not only is it always night, but specifically it's always three-o'-clock in the morning.
• No Macguffin No Winner: How the conflict over the Unholy Grail is resolved. Also, how John gets the psychonauts to quit manifesting in the Batman Cold Open of Hex and the City.
• No-Sell: Almost every Big Bad and Eldritch Abomination that threatens the Nightside is shown to be resisted whole or in part by something they hadn't really considered as powerful enough to stop them. Even Lillith herself in all her terrible glory can't grasp what The Engineer is, because she never considered technology to be a power and doesn't have any way to make people stop believing in Scientific Progress.
• Noodle Implements: Used multiple times, most memorably in Hell To Pay when John clears a room by changing all the televisions in the Griffon's office to the same Torture Porn channel and remarks "There are some things man is just not meant to know, let alone do with a moose."
• Noodle Incident: In Sharper, John mentions that he once attempted an angelic summoning to learn about his enemies. We don't know exactly what happened/went wrong, but apparently there used to be a hotel at the site, and it's still radioactive.
  • Between Nightingale and Sharper, Razor Eddie is MIA on the Street of the Gods. We never quite find out what he was doing there, but he made a lot of gods run out weeping, which is saying something. Also, besides redemption for using the Speaking Gun, he manages to "get an upgrade."
    • The short story "Razor Eddie's Big Night Out" reveals the reason why he went on a rampage there, although details on what/who he actually attacked are vague.
  • We never do find out what happens at Suzie's hen party. Then again, sending someone to find out probably would've resulted in one dead messenger.
  • Cathy, of all people, tells John that he doesn't want to know why she has a reputation for Arson and being on a first name basis with sex club owners.
• Occult Detective: John Taylor's chosen profession. Also Tommy and Larry Oblivion. The latter argues that Taylor technically isn't a proper detective, because he relies on his gift rather than on clues or evidence.
• Oh, Crap!: Typical reaction to John Taylor showing up. Or Suzie Shooter. Or Walker. Or about half the main recurring cast, really.
  • Hadleigh Oblivion gets this reaction even from Taylor.
• One Last Job: As John won't have enough time to be both Walker and a PI, he asks his teen secretary to find him one last case to go out on. As it turns out, it's Walker's wedding present, allowing him to go out of the PI business with a bang.
• Organ Dodge: In "Appetite For Murder", a Serial Killer with Super-Strength tries to rip open Ms. Fate's buxom chest. As he's apparently the only person in the Nightside who doesn't know Ms. Fate is a Wholesome Crossdresser, the killer is befuddled to find he's merely torn off one of the crime-fighter's falsies.
• Organ Theft:
  • One of John's staple threats is to offer to do this to someone's favorite organs with his Gift while they're alive and conscious.
  • Merlin Satanspawn's heart is said to have been stolen by Nimue, and he manifests with a gaping hole in his chest. It was actually John and Tommy Oblivion who stole it, time-traveling with Shotgun Suzie in Paths Not Taken.
• Our Elves Are Different: Elves used to rule this world, but we beat them by out-reproducing them, so most of them left.
• Our Gods Are Different: The Street of the Gods is full of self-proclaimed deities and religious groups. Most aren't really gods. A few could lay claim to the title, though - especially Razor Eddie.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Though technically revenants, Dead Boy and Larry Oblivion are variations on the walking dead.
• Our Wormholes Are Different: Timeslips, which just happen. Until we find out that they don't just happen. Suddenly and messily and all over the place.
• Paparazzi: The Unnatural Inquirer, from the book of the same name, is known for catering to people's desire for trashy celebrity gossip. Its reporters are so hated that their delivery trucks get firebombed and their receptionist works behind bulletproof glass.
  • When John and Suzie get a house together, they booby-trap its yard with land mines to keep the Nightside's celebrity scandalmongers out of their hair.
• Parental Abandonment: John's father drank himself to death when he learned that his wife wasn't human and she vanished. The return of John's mother is heavily implied to be likely to bring about The End of the World as We Know It. It very nearly did.
  • Melissa Griffin's parents were pretty much forced to hand her over to Jeremiah to raise, because nobody defies the Griffin. Subverted by Eleanor, who wheedled her way into at least getting to spend time with her son Paul.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The password to get into Caliban's Cavern in Nightingale's Lament is "swordfish." The simulacrum guarding the door won't tell John, but he cons it into revealing the word via Duck Season, Rabbit Season.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Jessica Sorrow the Unbeliever, Merlin Satanspawn, the Lord of Thorns, Hadleigh Oblivion, the Walking Man... and those are just the somewhat human examples.
• The Plan: Merlin pretty much pulls this off in Knight despite being killed. Twice.
• Poltergeist: Some friendly ones operate a sedan-chair taxi service. Another serves as copy-boy for the Night Times, rapidly shuffling documents in and out of his whirlwind "body".
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: In the Cold Open for Nightingale's Lament, John discovers that over 12% of the power in the Nightside comes from a man called the Sunslinger, who had a Romeo-and-Juliet-esque marriage with a scion of his family's mortal foe, the Hangman. The couple were murdered at the wedding party by their best man, who owned the power plant in question and wanted to harness the Sunslinger's light-based gift at an energy source. Even if he had to get it from his friend's spirit-bottled corpse.
  • Precious Memories. There's a reason the Walking Man starts there.
  • Each piece of a Sinister Albion knights armor is infused with the soul of an innocent killed by that knight. When John points out the similarity to the Droods' armor, the reply he gets is "Amateurs."
• The Power of Blood: The oracle-well John consults at the Mammon Emporium is paid in drops of blood, and he likewise uses a few drops to activate a scrying basin in Sharper. Annie Abattoir from the Dark Future uses her own blood to open passages into the past, through which John's Enemies send the Harrowing and others.
  • Magical blood retains its special properties, which can be transferred. Werewolf blood grants a Healing Factor to Suzie when John wrings blood from a werewolf pelt over her wounds, and she later heals John with her own were-imbued blood. John uses a drop of Julien Advent's blood to purify a bucket of the stuff for a summoning ritual, reasoning that traces of the potion that purified Julien himself remain within his veins.
• Psycho for Hire: Every other minor character.
  • Including the good guys, really.
• Pulling Themselves Together: Alex's idea of entertainment for Strangefellows is a guy who bloodily blows himself apart on stage, then plays this trope straight. It says something about Alex's bar that everyone cheers for this.
• Rape as Backstory: Suzie.
• Reality Is Out to Lunch: The flux fog from Uncanny.
• Reality Warper: Jessica Sorrow, Madman, and the Speaking Gun. Tommy Oblivion is a weak example, while his brother Hadleigh is much stronger.
• Red Light District: The Nightside has several of these, which cater to every conceivable taste. Not to mention a lot of inconceivable ones.
• Redemption Equals Death: Sinner in "Hex and the City."
• Reluctant Warrior: John, in regards to Excalibur, and power in general. Also touches on Be All My Sins Remembered. But this is why he so often gets it - he knows he's not worthy of it and doesn't want it, so the universe and its agents tend to saddle him with the power in question.
• Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?: Done with Walker's aforementioned Voice. He's getting sick of it. He only brought the dead back once. Considering how many other examples of people communicating with and/or summoning the dead have shown up in Green's Verse, Walker's frustration is justified. It's not that special, people, honestly!
  • For John, the Angel War, although he's quick to deny that it was his fault.
  • Nowadays the Lilith War is also laid at his feet.
• The Reveal: Suzie's tragic past and the identity of John's mother are major ones for the early books. Many of the short stories play out this trope for the supporting characters, revealing secrets about Razor Eddie, Dead Boy, or Larry Oblivion, as well as bit-players like Leo Morn and Harry Fabulous.
• Resurrection Revenge: Dead Boy was once a promising and upcoming detective who ended up mugged and brutally murdered. His spirit made a deal with an entity to return him to life so he could avenge his death and kill his murderers. However, he discovered that once his soul was returned and now possessing said deceased body, he could not leave it or pass on and was now a member of the undead for all of eternity.
• Retargeted Lust: Unnatural Inquirer starts with another attempt to make John and Suzie's relationship a physical one, but she still can't manage it. This causes John a small amount of frustration, which gets worse when his employer for the book wants him to work with an extremely attractive, somewhat grabby female reporter. However, in the end John ensures that nothing comes of it.
• Revenge Before Reason: Kae wants to take out Merlin for not being at Arthur's final battle in Paths. Due to his interference, when John finds out that Kae is running the Knights of London, he worries that Kae may want this towards him. But Kae subverts this; 1500 years undoubtedly helped.
• Royal Brat: Most of the Exiles who follow Queen Helena were this trope or worse, which is why they're incapable of coping when Timeslips dump them in the Nightside where nobody gives a damn about their titles.
• Rule 34: In the Nightside: More furtive faces disappeared into weapons shops, or brothels, where for the right price you could sleep with famous women from fiction.
• Running Gag: "Dagon shall rise again!"

S-Z

• Sadistic Choice: Subverted in the first novel, when the Collector warns John that giving Razor Eddie a Mercy Kill will mean dooming the insects which are the Bad Future's only surviving life to extinction. As John despises creepy-crawlies, the choice is actually so easy that he shocks the Collector.
• Screw Destiny: With the demise of King of Skin in Bride, the post-apocalyptic future John has repeatedly foreseen now appears to be impossible, or so he hopes.
• Senseless Sacrifice: Nimue gives up her own life force to try to prevent Merlin from dying, but even forfeiting all of it isn't enough. Made all the more pathetic in that nobody except John and Suzie even know she'd died for Merlin, as legend portrays her only as his willful betrayer.
• Sex Shifter: Jacqueline Hyde. She's a gorgeous descendant of Dr. Jekyll, he's a hulking brute who can rip peoples' limbs off. Deeply in love, but unable to meet face to face because they take turns occupying the same face via transformation.
• Shout-Out: Often several per page.
  • On more than one occasion is the "Traveling Doctor" mentioned to have been around.
    • That same traveling doctor probably left the sonic screwdriver in Strangefellows.
    • Taylor himself seems to have met the Fifth Doctor personally, as he borrows his "celery antidote" trick in Hex and the City.
    • The Traveling Doctor has also been seen meeting with the Strange Doctor and the Druid Doctor. Only in the Nightside...
    • Old Father Time is described as looking like a Victorian gentleman, which he says is the result of humans wanting to be comfortable around him, and states that the Travelling Doctor has a lot to answer for.
  • The Fractured Protagonist also makes a prominent appearance and from the description it's a good guess he's the Eternal Champion.
  • At Whitechapel Station, a few school girls are "kicking the crap" out of some Droogs.
  • John himself refers to having apprenticed with Carnacki the Ghost-Finder.
  • So who was that masked Frenchman who gave them a lift on the underground river in Hex and the City?
  • Alex once mentioned having had the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in his bar, playing bridge. Guess Twoflower's card-playing lesson must've sunk in after all...
  • A helpful animated hand once wiped down the bartop at Strangefellows. With a tribble.
  • The Coltranes toss a bunch of Morlocks out of Strangefellows after they complain about the bar snacks.
  • Among the Collector's possessions is a huge wicker man with a dead policeman inside.
  • At one point the Amber Prince shows up in Strangefellows, wondering who he is. Again.
  • The Authorities apparently operated a Time Tunnel in the '60s, but it never worked well.
  • The 6th century Nightside's roadkill-disposal services were evidently performed by packs of scavenging Brown Jenkins.
  • Somewhere along the way, the Collector seems to have acquired Number Six's jacket, and he claims he has his spy car too.
  • One of the vehicles parked at Griffin Hall for the party is a tachyon-sparking Delorean.
  • In Knight, King Artur's room number at the Fortress is 1408.
  • Julian Advent became a peak human specimen from a serum he made, but couldn't recreate due to a salt imperfection in the original formula.
  • The bar Strangefellows is not owned by Peter Stringfellow, who owns a number of London nightclubs.
  • A bookstore offers the infamous The King in Yellow, paired with rose-colored glasses to shield a would-be reader from the book's maddening effects.
  • A potted plant mutated by Bulldog Hammond's malfunctioning power ring in Judgement Day started lashing about with its sting.
  • That book where Tommy Oblivion got the idea of betting at random, without even looking at his cards, wouldn't have been Little Myth Marker, would it...?
  • In Uncanny, Walker not only quotes Hellraiser, but claims that he was technical adviser for the film.
  • In Hex And The City, Herne the Hunter vaguely mentions that the "World has moved on."
  • In Hex And The City, John mentions robots with positronic brains, a reference to the Robot Series by Isaac Asimov.
  • In "Razor Eddie's Big Night Out", the Egyptian cat-goddess Bast has come so far down in the world that she resorts to singing "Memory" for spare change on the Street of the Gods.
  • The end of "Hungry Heart" has John paraphrasing The Maltese Falcon when describing the entity inside the Hungry Heart box, claiming it's "the stuff screams are made of".
  • From its description and what it's capable of, Razor Eddie's trademark weapon is basically the Subtle Knife as a straight razor.
• Shrouded in Myth: John Taylor has a reputation of such mythic proportions that he's essentially weaponized it. He defeats many enemies just by introducing himself. Sometimes he's bluffing, sometimes not.
  • Many characters have this... The details of the Griffin's Deal with the Devil are subject to well-known rumors (and many of them), the origins and creator of the Nightside, Razor Eddie's mission in the Street of the Gods... it goes on and on.
  • The Walking Man, for much of the Nightside's population.
  • Some of the places have it too... Precious Memories has enough influence that, if a customer tries to talk about it, they instead end up killing themselves in short order. No one knows much about St. Jude, except it hasn't always been a church. And in one of the short stories, Silicon Heaven is known more as a rumor than as fact (though that has more to do with standards of decency in the Nightside... which really says something).
• Sinister Nudity: The Eldritch Abomination Lilith manifests as a navel-less nude woman in shades of grey. The body is nothing more than a concession to the physical world she's invading, and she's both Nigh-Invulnerable and indifferent to human mores, so clothes aren't a priority.
• Special Person, Normal Name: In a Nightside full of weird surnames/epithets ("Oblivion", "Fabulous") and weirder nicknames, John doesn't seem to have picked up either, despite being one of its more infamous residents.
  • The Collector's real name is Mark Robinson, and Walker's first name is Henry.
• Socialite: Mariah Griffin owns this trope. Being a class example of this is what Annie Abattoir brings to the new Authorities... well, that and being an expert spy/assassin.
• Spoiler Title: If you are familiar with the full line that the phrase "sharper than a serpent's tooth" originates from and the meaning behind it, then you should be able to figure out just how that particular book ends.
  • Not really a surprise, as it's established within the first page or two that John is fighting to stop his mother.
  • Rick, who owns a restaurant that serves imaginary and extinct creatures, shares a name with the lead character from Casablanca. Not to mention a suit. And a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. And the description of his face sounds a lot like Bogie...
• Talking Animal: Buggy-for-hire services in the Nightside are provided by talking horses. Any human in the coachman's seat is just there to make change and ward off other cars with a BFG.
  • Pen Donovan's dog Prince can speak English when he comes back from Heaven to fetch his master.
• Tell Me About My Mother: John spends the first few books waffling between this and knowing that it could lead to the end of world, but ends up going with it in the end.
• Time Abyss: While there's no shortage of entities dating back to Creation, or even before that in the case of the Primal, special mention has to go to Tommy Squarefoot the Neanderthal. While some of his kind have wound up in the Nightside via Timeslips, he did so via The Slow Path, and was calling Herne the Hunter a youngster two thousand years ago.
• Tomato Surprise: In the first novel, Joanna is a construct sent by the man-eating house to lure John to it.
  • In the short story "Razor Eddie's Big Night Out", it's not revealed until the end that the narrator, the modest last follower of the original (non-Lovecraftian) god Dagon, is Dagon himself.
• Trash of the Titans: Suzie Shooter's place is a total disaster area. John speculates that the only reason she doesn't have rats is that she eats them.
• Trigger-Happy: Shotgun Suzie, oh so very much.
• Unable to Cry: Poor Merlin, whose eyes-of-flame don't work that way...
• Uneven Hybrid: Alex Morrisey is descended from Merlin Satanspawn, albeit about fifteen centuries back. There's just enough of the Devil's blood in him that he can expect to live a very long lifespan, assuming running Strangefellows doesn't get him killed first.
• Unholy Matrimony: The Cavendishes, aka the Murder Masques. The slave couple who operate the Londinium-era precursor of Strangefellows also.
• Urine Trouble: How Godzi- er, Big Green Lizard got himself banned from the Nightside. To be fair, it was radioactive...
  • Also how Zog, King of the Pixies, got barred from the Griffin family's parties. Before he was deposed, a servant had followed him around with a bucket. And mop.
• Vertical Kidnapping: The angels' idea of "searching" for the Unholy Grail seemed mostly to involve snatching random people off the streets, questioning them, then dropping them from a great height when the unlucky victim didn't know anything useful. Or perhaps even if they did.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Pretty Poison. Harm Sinner, threaten Sinner, look cross-eyed at Sinner, and you are dead. As a succubus demon from Hell, she can do a lot of damage.
  • Once John and Suzie become openly involved, he starts citing this trope as yet another reason people shouldn't mess with him.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting:
  • The Charnel Chimera, a monstrous identity-thief Walker seeks to apprehend at the Griffins' party.
  • Argus of the Thousand Eyes, the Night Times's gossip-columnist who impersonates people's friends and loved ones to dig up juicy scandals.
  • Rogue, the Immortal who crashes the Ball of Forever in Bride.
• Vow of Celibacy: The Holy Trio, a team of religious heavy-hitters, consists of a man and woman who channel a spirit via the psychic strain of lifelong chastity vows. Which is fairly effective, at least until Razor Eddie transports them to the Church of the Glorious Marilyn and strips them stark naked.
• We Named the Monkey "Jack": Alex named his pet after his ex-wife Agatha. It says a lot about his feelings about their breakup that said pet is a vulture.
• The Worf Effect: First Razor Eddie, then Sinner, Pretty Poison and Madman, prove they're seriously deadly by ripping the Harrowing to bits. Off-page, the Lamentation massacres the Brittle Sisters of the Hive.
  • When Lilith finally shows herself, dead angels start falling out of the sky. Yes, the same angels that were rampaging unstoppably through the Nightside just a few books ago, virtually untouched by its staunchest defenders.
  • The Walking Man's unstoppability is decisively proven when he fights Razor Eddie to a standstill.
• Worf Had the Flu: The only reason the Nightside's defenders could put up even a token resistance during the Angel War is that the very nature of the place resists both Heaven's and Hell's influence, leaving both angelic armies weakened.
  • This turns out to be the reason that the Lord of Thorns, who wields the power of Yahweh, cannot stand up to Lilith, who is explicitly not as strong as Yahweh is. Turns out a bunch of the powers-at-be were secretly weakening him so that the two would take each other out.
• World Half Empty: John does the best he can, but the Nightside is not a happy place.
• Wretched Hive: The Nightside itself.
  • Neighborhoods like Freak Fair, the badlands, and Rats' Alley rate as this even by Nightside standards.
• Wrong Genre Savvy:
  • The Authorities presume that Taylor's mother Lilith is merely a rival out to make a profit. They're eaten alive when Lilith finds them.
  • The Nightside is a very morally grey, grim-n-gritty dark fantasy noir setting; characters like General Condor (a time-displaced spacefleet commander of the Picard variety), Ms. Fate (an extremely corny superheroine), or Julien Advent (a heroic adventurer with Victorian sensibilities) are noted not to quite fit in... although Julien at least has managed to stay respected without compromising his moral standards and Ms. Fate does accomplish some good.
  • Taylor himself is caught off-guard by his own genre preconceptions in "The Big Game", when he realizes that the vampires who threaten him aren't led by a conventional Dracula-style vampire, but by Varney: a pre-Stoker variant who operates under different rules and is virtually indestructible.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Implied in Just Another Judgment Day. Despite defeating his mother and destroying the Speaking Gun, the future he saw in the Timeslip may be coming still. The "Enemies" are the new Authorities, and the Speaking Gun can't really be destroyed due to its nature and that of the Nightside.
  • Possibly subverted, at long last, by events in Bride (see Screw Destiny).
  • John is often referred to as a Prince, a title which he roundly rejects. He then wears a crown of amazing technology forced on his head by Walker, ponders about being the King of the Nightside, and comes home to a gigantic kingmaking sword in the post. He may not have much of a choice about this one.
  • John spent most of Uncanny fighting Walker's offer to be, well, Walker. By the end of Bride, he hangs up his coat and takes a walk around the Nightside in a suit.
  • Ultimately subverted in Night Fall, when the Drood/Nightside conflict exposes how both sides need to understand each other better. This leads Taylor to swap his destiny for another, so he and Suzie wind up running the Drood Council, while Edwin Drood becomes the new Walker.

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