TERROR BY NIGHT

Supernatural husband-and-wife detectives—he’s a vampire, she’s a werewolf—take down paranormal perps in this rollicking horror fantasy.

Goodridge’s yarn opens in 1914, when New York police detective Madison Cavendish teams up with clairvoyant milliner Seneca Sue SunMountain (the police commissioner’s wife swears by her prophetic visions) to investigate the disappearance of a Broadway singer. Their encounter with the prime suspect, a tentacled, magenta-colored monster from the cosmic void, gets them killed and then reborn as vamp and lycanthrope, blessed with immortality, super-strength, and a primal bloodlust that they rein in with hyssop-oil tea; cementing their bond is their shared experience as light-skinned Black people passing as white in a racist society. After forming a private detective agency, their cases include a series of attacks by a were-hyena, which may implicate novelist Zora Neale Hurston and other figures of the Harlem Renaissance; a magic box containing a dangerous Persian demon that’s desperately sought by New York’s occult circles; and a vicious “blue devil dog” terrorizing West Virginia. Later chapters set in the 1960s and 70s feel grittier: Madison fights in Vietnam, where he slaughters dozens of Vietcong soldiers and spies a strange woman who hovers in the air and feasts on the corpses of the men he killed. The author sets a vivid, teeming fictive world of oddball characters and lurid creatures against an atmospheric portrait of Black New York and Harlem from their Jazz Age glory to the bleak 1970s era of heroin and street crime. With its juxtaposition of Madison and Sue’s usually affectionate banter and monster-of-the-month adventures, the novel often feels like a mash-up of The Thin Man and Ghostbusters. Goodridge’s elegant prose alternates between the jauntily picaresque and darker, gorier vibes when Madison and Sue unleash their beastly natures (“Sue, crouched over Octavius on hands and knees, ripped at his neck to the point of separating the poor soul’s head from the rest of his body”). The result is good, scary fun.

An entertaining romp, blending stylish storytelling and creepy carnage.