YMMV / The Vampire Files

• Complete Monster: We learn about Helen Tielli posthumously. She repeatedly tries to give her children up for adoption after her husband's death so she'd be free to party. When state authorities refused to take them, she brings her kids to an isolated area for a picnic. She takes her six-year-old son into the woods, cuts his throat and sets him on fire. Not quite dead, he screams in agony as she watches him burning. Helen then slits the throat of her three-year-old daughter and walks away, leaving them both for dead. Arrested soon afterward, the only time she says a word to the police is to ask how long her questioning would take, so she could go home and get dressed up for a date. Though her brother-in-law has been more than willing to adopt both kids, she wouldn't let him, because she can't stomach him being gay.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Apparently Johnathan Barrett, seeing as how he got his own spin-off.
• Fridge Logic: How do people in Chicago know that Malone's gay?
  • Probably justified, as Malone's boss Nevis was a gangster and would have employees checked out before trusting them anywhere near himself or his money. Whoever watched to see if Malone was working with another gang probably spotted him on a covert date with a man.
  • Barrett flat-out refuses to entertain the notion that Lauren could be a murderer on the grounds that she's "only a child". When Barrett was alive, girls younger than Lauren were often married with children, and boys that age were off fighting the American Revolution.
    • Barrett is attracted to Lauren. Thinking of her as "only a child" allows him to distance himself from her and rationally think of her as 'off-limits'.
• Funny Moments: In the first book, when Jack dresses up like his own freshly dead corpse and uses his Super Smoke to "haunt" his murderer, making him look paranoid and crazy to his men, and generally having a grand old time screwing with him.
  • Two in Lady Crymsyn. The first is Escott's reaction to seeing Sherry La Belle, the actress Jack hires to play the aforementioned Lady. And later, when Jack dumps Navis and Upshaw into the slime pit at the Stock Yards. You're all ready to believe that he's about to cross the Moral Event Horizon by drowning them in the leftovers of slaughtered cattle, then it turns out it's not deep enough to drown them and Jack's just making them sit there all night and is laughing his undead ass off.
• Nightmare Fuel: The "dreams" Jack has when he spends the daytime without his home earth. Also, directly after the Hope Spot above, Jack is left nailed to the floor by a freaking stake, and no one has any idea where he is. He is in unspeakable pain, he's on the roof and sunrise is coming, and Bobbi is probably going to be a snack for the demented bitch who did this to him. When Escott later comes to rescue him, what he sees probably qualifies. The stairwell is soaked in blood all the way up to the ceiling, his best friend is pinned to the floor and maybe dead for real, and looks like an ancient corpse. The scene where Jack and Escott find Barrett staked in Bloodcircle probably qualifies too, if only because it highlights Jack's previous impalement. And the story of how Maureen was killed... yeah, being a vampire makes you harder to kill, but when you are it's pretty damn horrific.

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