Literature / Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.

aka: Death Warmed Over

A horror-comedy detective series by Kevin J. Anderson, chronicling the cases of Dan Chambeaux, private investigator in the Unnatural Quarter. Shot dead while seeking his girlfriend's murderer, Dan returns to "life" as a zombie: one of countless "unnaturals" spawned by the supernatural upheaval of the Big Uneasy. Together with his ghost-girlfriend Sheyenne, his BHF (Best Human Friend) police officer MacGoo, and Robin Dyer, his civil-rights attorney business partner, Dan tackles mysteries in which a multitude of monsters - natural and unnatural - engage in all-too-human criminal behavior, and anything could be the culprit.

Novels in the series include:

• Death Warmed Over (2012)
• Unnatural Acts (2013)
• Hair Raising (2013)
• Slimy Underbelly (2014)
• Tastes Like Chicken (2017)
• Double-Booked (2022)
• Bats In the Belfry (2023)

Additional short stories featuring Chambeaux are compiled in the anthologies Working Stiff (2015) and Services Rendered (2018).

Tropes included in this series:

• Abusive Parents: McGoo's ex-wife Rhonda makes her daughter Alvina sleep on the couch and feed herself. When Alvina is injured in a skateboarding accident, Rhonda insists on taking her to the cheapest clinic possible, causing Alvina to be turned into a vampire thanks to a sketchy blood transfusion. Rhonda then calls her daughter a freak and sends her to the Unnatural Quarter to live with her two potential fathers.
• Accidental Misnaming: Thunder Dick claims his familiar's name is Morris, while the cat insists it's Maurice. On the one hand, Dick is an idiot who could easily be wrong; on the other, the cat's a Deadpan Snarker who could be claiming a different name just to make Dick look like one.
• Alas, Poor Villain: In the third book Dr. Victor and his wife. Yes he nearly started a werewolf war by scalping them for a curse for baldness, but he did have a loving relationship with his wife and seemed on the verge of redemption as she said she like him the way he was before his marauding experiment killed them.
• All Animals Are Dogs: Spot, Rover and Fido are giant rats living in the city dump. The foreman plays fetch with them.
• All Elections Are Serious Business: Rival candidates for top Weather Wizard in the city cause havoc in Slimy Underbelly with their respective campaigns' over-the-top weather control demonstrations.
• The Alleged Car: Chambeaux & Dyer uses a barely-functional Ford Maverick that's held together mostly by rust as a company car. Sheyenne nicknames it "the Pro Bono Mobile", because they'd be able to afford something better if not for Robin's continual willingness to offer free legal aid to those who can't pay.
• Amoral Attorney: Not Robin herself of course, but her opponent in the custody case in the third book is pretty slimy and prejudiced.
• Artificial Cannibalism: Post-Big Uneasy, processed food products that "taste just like human" become big sellers to many types of Unnatural.
• Artistic License – Law: After Harvey Jekyll is executed, he reanimates as a zombie and is immediately set free because his legal sentence has been carried out. The possibility of keeping him in prison for the numerous non-capital crimes for which he was also charged isn't addressed, even though Real Life death sentences are usually accompanied by prison terms for other related offenses, just in case the capital conviction gets overturned on appeal.
  • Robin is guilt-shamed into taking Harvey Jekyll as a client, despite her objection that she'd previously advocated for his ex-wife in a divorce proceeding and thus, has a conflict of interest. The fact that Harvey'd tried to kill Robin herself in the first book would be a far, far better justification for her to reject his demand for her services, but neither she nor Dan mention it.
• Attack of the Monster Appendage: The mysterious tentacles from Slimy Underbelly.
• The Atoner: Maximus the necromancer from the second book does run a pretty revolting sweat shop (which he says is an honest racket after he quit raising dead bodies) but does strive to be more honest when he reappears and apparently gave one of his former golem workers a good job to try and apologize for what they were put through.
• Back for the Dead: Downplayed. Fletcher, Sheyenne's old boss, shows up in Slimy Underbelly for his first in-person appearance since the first book and is killed by a sewer monster. However, he quickly returns to life as a ghost. 
• Bad Guy Bar: Played with by the Goblin Tavern, which looks like this trope due to its seedy, cobweb-draped fittings and monstrous clientele, yet its patrons are no more criminally-inclined than anyone else in the Quarter and Officer McGoo is a regular. In fact, when it briefly did get taken over by the Smile Syndicate, the new owners tried to convert it from a neighborhood dive to a sickeningly-gentrified tourist trap with a tacky "monster" theme.
• The Bartender: Francine at the Goblin Tavern is a particular favorite of the bar's patrons, whom Robin organizes into a protest rally when Stu tries to fire her. Not an Unnatural, but Francine's been through so many hardships and bad decisions in her human life that she has no difficulty commiserating with their problems.
• Basilisk and Cockatrice: A depowered breed of cockatrice is used for sport in Unnatural cock-fighting rings.
• Beast Man: Hairball werewolves, Lurrm and the other frog-demons in Slimy Underbelly, and various passing references to lizard-people.
• Beastly Bloodsports: Cockatrice fighting in Hair Raising.
• BFG: Inverted with the gnome gang's "Timmy guns", which are scaled-down Thompson machine guns that have roughly the same penetrating force as a stapler.
• Bizarro Apocalypse: Played for Laughs with 'The Big Uneasy': after an (elderly) virgin witch spills a drop of her blood on the Necronomicon, all sorts of supernatural beings including zombies, vampires, werewolves and good old Eldritch Abominations begin to manifest on Earth
• Boomerang Bigot: Harvey Jekyll, the Big Bad in book one, is executed for attempted genocide against the Unnaturals he hates, only to revive as a zombie himself. Senator Balfour's campaign to repress Unnaturals nationwide is derailed when Jekyll outs him as another zombie, who'd died in his sleep but kept his condition a secret.
• Boom, Headshot!: Dan died this way, and keeps the exit hole it left in his forehead concealed with morticians' putty.
• Bothering by the Book: Robin prevents the ghost outlaws in "High Midnight" from firing off another volley at Dan by pointing out that doing so would breach their contract with Mild Bill's Wild West show, ruining their budding careers as performers.
• Brain Food: Down-and-out zombies are susceptible to an addiction to eating brains.
• Can't Have Sex, Ever: Dan can't have sex with his girlfriend Sheyenne because she's a ghost, unable to touch anything animate. In Unnatural Acts, they find a stopgap solution: Sheyenne can manipulate inanimate objects, so she wears gloves to hold Dan's hand and offers to possess a blow-up doll for intimate relations. Dan turns the latter down, content to just hold her/it.
• Carpet-Rolled Corpse: A rolled-up and bloodstained carpet is spotted by Dan at Cralo's body-parts emporium, being hauled through a side door marked "Deliveries".
• Chekhov's Gun: Snazz's crystal ball from Unnatural Acts. Rusty's blacked-out cockatrice coops and the Victors' clogged-up shower drain in Hair Raising. Jody's X-ray specs in Slimy Underbelly.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Mel, the zombie dump manager, is reminisced about by Dan as the subject of his first unnatural-related investigation. Mel later becomes an informant and victim in the investigation of Harvey Jekyll.
  • Steve, the other zombie who rose from Greenlawn Cemetery on the same night Dan did, eventually shows up seeking representation in a child-custody dispute.
• Chocolate Baby: The Eldritch Abomination from Slimy Underbelly, born with a tentacled head and a human body. In this case, it's the human body that his Cosmic Horror parents weren't expecting....
• City with No Name: It's unstated which city the Unnatural Quarter is a part of, although it's definitely in the United States. A comment by Dan about accents implies it's not in the South, and passing remarks show it's nowhere near Montana or the Dakotas. We do know it's a death-penalty state, that it snows there in December, and that Dan needs a concealed-carry permit for his gun.
• Clingy MacGuffin: Esther the harpy's bad luck charm from Hair Raising, which she can only get rid of if someone else accepts it from her.
• Covers Always Lie: Dan is always depicted on the book covers as pallid enough that his zombie-hood is obvious, but looks much more human in the stories. The first two novels also show him in the classic "detective trenchcoat", despite his bullet-holed sport jacket being a signature garment for Chambeaux.
• Cthulhumanoid: Ah'Chulhu has a human body and a tentacled Senior Citizen God head.
• Dead Artists Are Better: The first case Dan is shown working on is that of a ghost artist who's having a feud with his heirs: they don't want him to start painting again, because his pre-mortem paintings' value will plummet if they aren't his "last work" anymore.
• Death Is Cheap: Both Dan and Sheyenne return from the grave shortly prior to first novel's events, and at least two recurring characters { Harvey Jekyll and Fletcher Knowles) do so in mid-series. Mild Bill, the ghost saloon keeper, is killed by ghost bullets only to revive as a ghost again, against all odds.
• Desperate Object Catch: In Unnatural Acts, the villain threatens to smash a highly-volatile bottled soul if Dan and his friends don't back off. When the villain is grabbed from behind, the jar is dropped and Dan dives underneath it, letting it strike his own body rather than the floor so it won't crack and explode. In "Eye of Newt", he likewise saves the stolen eyeball of Geck the newt-person from becoming the secret ingredient in a cooking-contest entry, catching it as it's dropping into the cauldron.
• Detachment Combat: When Dan's arm is ripped off by a hulking enemy in book one, he continues to control its movements even when it's all the way across the room. His control is too clumsy for it to fight, but he does make it grab his attacker's ankle as a distraction.
  • Ah'Chulhu from Slimy Underbelly can voluntarily detach his face-tentacles and send them out to attack people, while the rest of him remains in public view for the perfect alibi.
• Disability Immunity: Being a ghost is usually a bother for Sheyenne, but it does make her immune to many threats, including the bomb she carries away for disposal in Unnatural Acts and the pureblooded cockatrice's petrifying ugliness in Hair Raising.
• Distinction Without a Difference: When Thunder Dick's cat complains that Dick neutered him, Dick protests that this is untrue: he had a vet do the neutering because the instructions were too complicated for him to do it himself.
• Divorce Assets Conflict: More like death assets conflict, when Steve Halsted seeks Chambeaux & Deyer's help in preventing his ex-wife from squandering the life insurance money he'd meant for his son, and ensuring he retains visitation rights even as a zombie.
• Dodgy Toupee: Dr. Victor sports a truly terrible one, even though his wife insists she prefers him bald.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: In Hair Raising, Dan needs to figure out who is scalping the full-time werewolves. In the end it turns out to be Dr. Victor, the friendly coroner and another of Dan's clients Victor did it to perfect his hair-growth formula.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Senator Balfour's followers are an obvious satire of America's Tea Party activists and Westboro Baptist Church.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Dan Chambeaux isn't fond of his nickname of "Shamble", because it reminds him of the badly-decomposed zombies called "shamblers" for their decrepit lack of coordination.
  • Thunder Dick the weather wizard is an inversion: he actually chose to be called that, but picked a nickname that everyone else finds embarrassing.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In the second book Travis is a slimy, thieving con man who cares more about getting money form his sisters ghost than the fact that she's dead, and falls in with a Van Helsing Hate Crimes crowd. Neverthless, he is unable to re-kill the ghost of his sister as part of the Unnatural-haters' plan.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Subverted; while some ghosts' presence causes dogs to react with loud barking or fear, others could volunteer at the animal shelter without arousing any such reaction.
• Excrement Statement: Thunder Dick's familiar loves pooping and peeing all over Dick's apartment as a gesture of contempt and disrespect. Alma Wannovich, unable to speak ever since she was transformed into a pig, urinates on the sidewalk as an alternative to scolding the crowd that'd threatened to make her a pork lunch.
• Fair-Play Villain: The ghost of Gentleman Thief Alphonse Wheeler takes pains to break out of prison without using his ghostly powers, specifically so as to avoid "cheating".
• Familiar: Morris/Maurice, the talking cat companion of Thunder Dick, is not happy about being an example of this trope. At least, not for a master like Thunder Dick.
• Fantastic Ghetto: The Unnatural Quarter, which is itself divided into "ethnic" neighborhoods of sorts (e.g. Little Transylvania, the sewers). Justified in the latter case by different Unnatural types' physical needs, as with prohibitions on street lighting where darkness-loving species predominate.
• Fantastic Racism: Anti-unnatural prejudice is personified by Straight Edge and Senator Balfour's followers. Golems aren't even regarded as unnaturals, but as tools, by many. Full-time "Hairball" werewolves and transforming "Monthly" werewolves don't much like each other in Hair Raising.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Zombies, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, ghouls, trolls, ogres, gremlins, harpies, banshees, goblins, demons (numerous kinds), golems, hellhounds, witches, wizards, basilisks, elves, dwarfs, voodoo magic, bigfeet, yetis, fairies, gargoyles, medusas, liches, minotaurs, skeletons, genies, feathered serpents, imps, cockatrices, animated lawn gnomes, talking animals (cats, rats, and sewer gators), rock monsters, nightmares, unicorns, Senior Citizen Gods, Santa Claus, and the Phantom of the Opera all exist in this world.
• Forced Transformation: Two recurring characters are a pair of witch sisters, one of whom was transformed permanently into a sow due to a typo in a book of spells.
• Forgettable Character: True of both Bigfeet and yetis, to the point where most people still assume they're mythical, despite the Big Uneasy having brought all the other monsters out of the closet.
• Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Sheldon Fennerman, Tiffany, Linda Bullwer, and Anton Stickler are prominent examples of this.
• Friendly Zombie: Zombies in this universe retain their pre-mortem personalities and remain functioning members of society after coming back from the grave.
• Gag Haircut: The reason the Parlour (BNF) isn't getting much business in Hair Raising is that Rova is such a bad stylist, she gives everyone one of these.
• Gasshole: Tony Cralo, grossly-overweight zombie mob boss. In his case, it's outgassing from decomposition, not digestive issues.
• Gentleman Thief: Alphonse Wheeler held up banks for a living, but was always polite during robberies, and would give a bouquet of flowers to a female teller as a Calling Card.
• Giving Them the Strip: Both Dan and Lurrm slip away from the sewer-tentacles by shedding their jacket.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The experimental heart transplant in Hair Raising.
• Groin Attack: Were-form Miranda Jekyll gives an epic one to the Big Bad in book one.
• Harping on About Harpies: Esther, terrible and vindictive waitress at the Ghoul's Diner.
• Helping Hands: C.H., towel-boy and masseur at the Recompose Spa.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The Victors are killed by Harriet's own hair and Archibald's own miracle hair tonic. One of the pure-blooded cockatrices turns a victim to stone, then gets squashed under the resulting statue when it topples over.
• Honest Corporate Executive:
  • After Miranda Jekyll takes over her sinister husband's pharmaceutical company, she runs it a lot more ethically than he ever did and seeks to genuinely serve the Unnatural Community (albeit in an Enlightened Self-Interest way) rather than poison them for the sake of Van Helsing Hate Crimes beliefs.
  • Vincent "Goldfanger" Galdi from Bats in the Belfry professes to run an honest racetrack, seems to make good on that promise, and gives well-paying jobs to needy but unqualified walking headless corpses. When he learns they were forcibly separated from their heads and want to return to their old lives, he releases them from their contracts, give them severance pay, and sponsors a media awareness campaign to reunite them and other victims of the same racket with their stolen heads.
• I'm Melting!: The gruesome fate of unnaturals poisoned by the contaminated JLPN products.
• Incongruously-Dressed Zombie: The Patchwork Princess's suitors were evidently buried in, and subsequently arose as zombies wearing, a powder-blue prom tux and a Disneyland hoodie.
• Interspecies Romance: Dan (zombie) and Sheyenne (ghost). The Pattersons, a married vampire and Hairball werewolf. Subverted by Miranda Jekyll's affair with Hirsute, as she was human until unsafe sex turned her into a Monthly werewolf.
• Ironic Echo: Sheyenne takes obvious pleasure in turning Alice the gremlin's dismissive "Moving on" back on her.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: Played with. While not every case Dan investigates is the fault of a given novel's main villain, characters or Macguffins from subplots often provide a convenient means of resolving otherwise-unrelated cases.
• The Klutz: Furguson, ultra-clumsy adolescent werewolf from Hair Raising. Possibly the only person ever to contract lycanthropy by accidentally scratching himself on his sleeping uncle's claws.
• Lethal Eatery: The Ghoul's Diner.
• The Loins Sleep Tonight: In Hair Raising part of the werewolf feud comes from Rusty tryngin to get a magic tattoo that would make him important and his enemies tricking the tattooist into thinking that he'd really said impotent.
• Losing Your Head: Happened to the client of "Head Case"... twice. In this instance, it's not his original decapitation that needs solving, but where his disembodied, still-animate head wound up after it went missing, leaving his equally-animate body to seek Dan's help.
• Lovecraft Lite: Slimy Underbelly has a Cthulhu-knockoff villain and Senior Citizen Gods. The Big Uneasy itself was unleashed due to an unlikely accident with the original Necronomicon.
• Lucky Charms Title: Jody from Slimy Underbelly is very insistent that his supervillain alter-ego be referred to as "Dr. Darkness!!!", complete with all three exclamation marks.
• Mad Scientist: Quite a few of them are around, including the Unnatural Quarter's medical examiner. The fact that mad scientists tend to be named "Victor" is both lampshaded and subverted, as it's the M.E.'s last name.
  • Slimy Underbelly reveals that there's a Mad Scientist Patent Office, a Mad Scientist Trademark Office, and at least one Mad Scientists' Summer Camp for gifted young wannabe-examples.
• Magic Feather: Bela the trapeze artist's medallion from "Stakeout at the Vampire Circus", which he believes he needs to activate his vampiric bat-transformations. Dan himself makes the analogy to Dumbo.
• Master of Disguise: Jody Caligari passes himself off as a hunchback, a mummy, and a gator-guy in Slimy Underbelly. In "Role Model", the culprit in the cosplay-convention murder adopts six different fictional personas, including that of in-verse novel character "Dan Shamble".
• Meaningful Name: Hope Saldana. Missy and Irwyn Goodfellow. Stentor the ogre opera singer (once he gets his voice back).
  • Subverted with Trove National Bank, which is named for its founder rather than treasure-troves.
• Monster Mash: Pretty much every horror-story monster exists in the Dan Shamble stories' Verse.
• Monster Town: New Orleans is overflowing with every kind of monster imaginable after a benevolent Bizarro Apocalypse. They peacefully coexist with humans for the most part, save for the odd Fully-Embraced Fiend.
• Mud Wrestling: Two unbaked, female-sculpted golems duke it out in a mud pit for the entertainment of a crowd, and wind up reducing one another to inanimate clay. Their managers then shovel the clay back into molds and re-cast spells which grant animation in readiness for the combatants' next performance.
• Muggle Best Friend: Lampshaded with Chambeaux's BHF (Best Human Friend), McGoo.
• Mundane Utility: A wizard acts as auctioneer in Unnatural Acts, being well practiced in reciting spells rapidly yet intelligibly. Ruth, a succubus whose touch withers plants, finds a new career at a shop that specializes in dried flower arrangements.
• Named After Somebody Famous: Self-invoked by the head of the ghostly actors' troupe from book two, who'd had his own name legally changed to William Shakespeare.
• Never Going Back to Prison: Mr. Bignome, although he was never in prison, is determined to fight to the death rather than be arrested.
• No Full Name Given: Sheyenne is the only main character whose surname is unstated in the books. Her real first name is Anne, but her last one never crops up, even in the novel where her brother appears.
• Not Growing Up Sucks: In Tastes Like Chicken, Alvina becoming a vampire at the age of ten is portrayed as sad and serious. She'll spend the rest of her potentially eternal life going through puberty without being able to get older and have a husband and kids one day. Also, she'll never have a chance to try out for cheerleading.
• N-Word Privileges: Tiffany cracks a bunch of off-color vampire jokes as her open-mike comedy routine. McGoo complains that Dan doesn't seem to mind such jokes from her, and Dan replies that Tiffany, being a vampire herself, is "allowed".
• Occult Detective: Dan. Played with in that sometimes his clients are supernatural, but the actual case is something mundane like an art theft or insurance scam.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted in the backstory, in which Dan and McGoo are both divorced from women named Rhonda. Also averted by Sheyenne's brother Travis from Unnatural Acts, who shares his first name with the vampire screenwriter from Tastes Like Chicken.
• Organ Theft: In Hair Raising, McGoo asks Dan's help investigating the death of a vampire whose internal organs were removed. An unknown assailant in the same book keeps ambushing Hairball werewolves, tasering them unconscious, and stealing their scalps. In "Eye of Newt", the titular organ is stolen from a newt-person and must be recovered before it can be used in a cooking contest.
• Orifice Evacuation: The Wannovich sisters put a protective spell on Sheldon Fennerman's home. If he or his residence are threatened, the culprit suffers a sudden infestation of live cockroaches in their stomach. Cue ballistic roach-vomiting.
• Our Gnomes Are Weirder: They're literal lawn gnomes, made of ceramic but animated like pint-sized golems.
• Our Slogan Is Terrible: Marketers at the Smile Syndicate seem oblivious to the fact that "We hope your day is a sunny one" must sound more like a death-threat than a courtesy to the Quarter's vampire residents.
  • Even that one is a vast improvement over Richard Thudner's campaign slogan: "Be a Dick supporter!"
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Two kinds of werewolf are common after the Big Uneasy: full-time Wolf Men nicknamed "Hairballs", and full-moon-transforming "Monthlies". The former resemble Universal's classic "Wolf Man", while the latter range from bipedal-and-passionate to quadrupedal-and-berserk when transformed. Interestingly, both types are contagious, and can infect normal humans with their claws as well as their fangs.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Zombies arise by sheer luck: one for every seventy-five deaths, heavily weighted toward suicides and murder victims. Fully sentient creatures, they occasionally do eat brains, but it's considered a tragic addiction rather than normal zombie behavior. It's mentioned that mad scientists and necromancers sometimes craft the "artificial" and "voodoo" variants, although the former aren't generally referred to as zombies.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: "The most fabulous performance by an ogre opera singer in weeks!"
• Parental Abandonment: As a baby, Ah'Chulu from Slimy Underbelly was dumped down the sewer by his Senior Citizen God mother and stepfather. The couple then emigrated to the Netherworld.
• Pass the Popcorn: McGoo brings a bag of popcorn to the execution of The Dragon, an unbearably bigoted Hate Sink, at the end of the first book.
• Photo Op with the Dog: As Thunder Dick and Alistair Cumulus III campaign to be elected head of the Weather Wizards Fraternal Order, each tries to impress reporters and the public by doing things like saving a museum from flooding and making it snow a little to ease the summer heat.
• Playing Both Sides: In Slimy Underbelly, Thunder Dick and Alistair are both secretly accepting donations from the city's weather forecasters in exchange for agreeing to manipulate the weather to match their forecasts.
• Poltergeist: Although incorporeal, Sheyenne can manipulate inanimate objects, which allows her to work as Dan and Robin's office manager and paralegal. Uncle Stan misuses similar powers to harass his niece and her family.
  • Actual poltergeists are occasionally mentioned, e.g. the pair that keep throwing garbage at Harvey Jekyll's apartment door and mailbox.
• Pom-Pom Girl: Adrianna Cruz, one of Dan's clients in Hair Rising, is a former cheerleader who went on to law school and volunteer at a community center.
• Post-Modern Magik: Lots; vampires slathering themselves with sunscreen and buying expired donor blood in bars, werewolves using oversized hair dryers, warehouse outlets for human body parts, and Harvey Jekyll's ectoplasmic defibrillators.
• Power Tattoo: Scratch and Sniff have magical tattoos that heal their injuries. Anton Stickler applies custom Power Tattoos to clients as well as regular ones.
• Prevent the War: Keeping the Hairball and Monthly werewolves' rivalry from degenerating into an all-out gang war is a major plotline in Hair Raising.
• Psycho Serum: A mysterious contaminant in the Quarter's marketed-for-consumption blood supply causes vampires who unwittingly ingest it to go berserk in Tastes Like Chicken.
• Rapid Hair Growth: In Hair Raising, a mad scientist attempts to develop a cosmetic formula that would cause instantaneous hair growth. He eventually succeeds, but only by using the stolen scalps of werewolves to create it. Then it works too well, and fills his house with hair when some of his invention drips into a clogged-up shower drain.
• Recursive Canon: Dan's exploits become the inspiration for an in-Verse series of mystery novels. The first one shares a title with the actual first book in the series, whose events it documents, albeit with a lot more Fanservice.
• Reference Overdosed: Virtually every page has a Shout-Out or pop-culture reference.
• Resurrected Romance: Dan and Sheyenne were dating before their respective murders, and picked up where they left off after they both came back.
• Rising Water, Rising Tension: In Slimy Underbelly, rising sewer-waters threaten to flood the Unnatural Quarter, including the museum. Not only does this ruin most of mummy Ramen-Hotep's possessions, but museum staff must resort to frantic bailing to save the original Necronomicon, which can't be moved to a higher floor due to the multiple, hard-to-disassemble layers of enchantments used to secure the powerful book.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: Spot, Fido and Rover, the giant rats at the city dump.
• Sauna of Death: Played with; an undead patron of the Zombie Bathhouse who'd remained in the sauna far, far too long walks out a naked skeleton, all the flesh having cooked and slipped off the unfortunate customer's bones. At least, being undead, they do walk out.
• Saving Christmas: Santa hires Dan to track down his stolen N/N list in "Naughty and Nice".
• Sewer Gator: Ah'Chulhu's gator-guy minions, which walk upright and talk.
• Shady Real Estate Agent: Edgar Allan, a troll who rents out vacated crypts to unnatural clients, has shades of this trope, although he's usually cooperative with Dan's investigations.
• So Unfunny, It's Funny: MacGoo's stupid Unnatural jokes aren't funny, but watching Dan squirm over them can be, particularly when he grudgingly admits to liking one of the less-lame examples, but refrains from letting on to his BHF.
• Sudden Sequel Heel Syndrome:
  • Dr. Victor is just a quirky coroner in Unnatural Acts, but is a major antagonist of the next book, Hair Raising, where he inadvertently starts a werewolf war by not-so-inadvertently scalping several werewolves (albeit nonfatally) as part of a Mad Scientist experiment to cure his baldness.
  • In Tastes Like Chicken, mail-order sorcerer Alterro may be a greedy scammer, but he is also a useful and underappreciated ally, inventing a useful combat spell that Dan uses in a fight against a Serial Killer and letting Dan know about the sinister truth behind some magic that the Big Bad is using. When he returns in Bats in the Belfry, he is kidnapping zombies, decapitating them, and selling their still conscious heads as souvenirs.
• Supervillain: In Slimy Underbelly, a boy inventor who's a bit unclear on the "villain" part of this trope aspires to become one so he can protect people. Granted, he's growing up in a world where terrifying monsters live as regular citizens, so his perspective on "villains" is justifiably different.
• Taken for Granite: Pureblooded cockatrices are ugly enough to do this to corporeal onlookers, although domesticated ones bred for pit-fighting aren't quiiiite that hideous. When Rusty turns some of the former loose in Hair Raising, a few innocent witnesses and several of the novel's villains succumb to this trope.
• Taking the Bullet: Dan shields Robin with his undead body when Mr. Bignome's gang attack a florist shop early in Slimy Underbelly. As the lawn gnomes' firearms are scaled-down to their size, it's more like Taking The BBs, but she still could've lost an eye without his help.
  • McGoo gets a chance to do this for Dan in "High Midnight", when he leaps into the line of fire from the ghost outlaws. He was fairly sure that ghost bullets couldn't hurt the living, but wasn't going to take the chance that his Best Zombie Friend - neither living nor ghost - was susceptible.
• Talking Animal: Morris/Maurice the tuxedo cat, as well as the gator-boys and some mutant sewer rats.
• Technologically Blind Elders: In Tastes Like Chicken (written in 2017 and set 20 Minutes into the Future), when Alvina says she's on social media, Dan tries to imagine a "correct cool and modern" phrase and asks if she's on MySpace.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: The only feature distinguishing Ma'Chulhu from Pa'Chulhu is that the former has big floppy red bows tied around one of her myriad tentacles.
• Trapped in TV Land: "Game Night" sees Dan, Robin and McGoo accidentally trapped in a pre-Big Uneasy board game. One about a Zombie Apocalypse, no less.
• Undead Tax Exemption: Deconstructed. Robin's career is built around stretching the legal system's boundaries to encompass unnaturals' civil rights, and she's personally established several important legal precedents. Many laws have already been changed to cope with the Big Uneasy, such as those mandating escape-latches on coffins.
• The Unmasqued World: Zombie detective Dan Shamble solves cases in the Unnatural Quarter, a ghetto of supernaturals birthed by the Big Uneasy.
• The Un-Twist: Given that his name is Harvey Jekyll, it's not exactly a surprise when the Big Bad in book one transforms into a hulking brute.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Mr. Bignome's mother believes her son went bad due to Stentor having unintentionally shattered something in the young lawn gnome's ceramic heart with his operatic performance.
• Vampires Own Nightclubs: Inverted with Fletcher Knowles, a human later ghost club manager whose night spot (Basilisk) caters to vampires.
• Vegetarian Vampire: Post-Big Uneasy, "blood bars" and retailers make expired donor blood available to customers. Backsliding vampires who kill humans are tried for murder and executed if caught, so even the less-than-moral ones generally refrain from preying on people.
• Virgin Power: The Big Uneasy was unleashed when a drop of virgin's blood fell upon the Necronomicon under a full moon and during a rare astrological conjunction. A homely fifty-eight-year-old witch's blood, shed via a paper cut, but a virgin's blood nonetheless.
  • Large amounts of virgin's blood is required for Ah'Chulhu's ritual in Slimy Underbelly. Unfortunately for the bad guys, the only source they can find is one-shot packets from a vampire bar, which take a loooong time to open.
• Vocal Dissonance: In Slimy Underbelly, an ogre's powerful baritone voice is magically stolen: swapped for the piping squeak of a gnome criminal, who wanted a voice suitable to command his gang of robbers.
• Wanted a Son Instead: Alvina's unique name comes from how her mother, Rhonda, is a fan of Alvin and the Chipmunks and was hoping for a son to name after the main character. Describing their relationship as one of nonstop Parental Neglect might be giving Rhonda too much credit.
• Weather Manipulation: Thunder Dick and Alistair Cumulus III both specialize in this sort of magic.
• What Happened To The Rats?: Some readers do wonder what became of Spot, Fido, and Rover after the dump foreman was re-killed.
• Whodunnit to Me?: A big part of Death Warmed Over concerns Dan's hunt for his own murderer. Sheyenne accompanies him when he's looking for hers, also.
• The Worm That Walks: In the fourth novel, the villain behind everything is revealed to be a flock of demon-possessed feral chickens which jointly operate a Mobile-Suit Human made from taxidermied human skin.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: When one of his robbery-accomplices has his ceramic foot shattered by a police bullet, rendering him unable to reach their getaway car, Mr. Bignome kills the now-useless lawn gnome to ensure the accomplice can't blab to the cops.
• Your Costume Needs Work: Dan gets this from a costume judge at a cosplay con he attends in the short story "Role Model".
• Zombie Advocate: Robin's law specialty is defending unnaturals' civil rights. Mrs. Saldana, founder of a mission for down-and-out unnaturals, also gets her involved in MILDEW (Monsters' Legal Defense Workers).