December's recommendation: Sunshine, by Robin McKinley.
McKinley is not one of those authors who creates a world and then parks herself in it for twelve books. The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword are in the same world, but separated by a large span of time, and Deerskin only makes a passing mention of being in the same setting, as I recall.
I hope she's going to make an exception for this book.
Sunshine is set in our world, but as with Laurell K. Hamilton, it's a version of our world where creatures like vampires and werewolves are a fact of life, not a legend. Collectively, they're simply known as the Others, and vampires are the darkest Others. In McKinley's world, however, that phrase doesn't quite conjure up the goth wet dreams you'd expect it to, because she makes it very distinctly clear that vampires are not. human. They're human-shaped, but that's about it. They're dead things that move according to impulses and emotions we can't understand, and though there are still idiots in her world who lust after vampires, they're people who have never seen one. Vampires are not sexy.
Except for one of them, of course. McKinley fails miserably to make him not hot. <g>
Humanity and the Others are at war, and have been for a long time. The Voodoo Wars (which are never fully explained, though you can figure out the gist just fine) ended about ten years ago, but although humans theoretically won them, the truth is they're still losing. The Others are taking over, bit by bit. This is a world where, although the sun is up for quite a bit of it, a shadow seems to hang over everything. The Others are everywhere. Not all of them are evil, or even hostile -- McKinley mentions at one point that for every werewolf you hear about, there's ten werechickens nobody bothers to mention <g> -- but it doesn't change the fact that humanity is slowly, inexorably losing to those who are.
Yet for all that this sounds incredibly dark, the book is hysterical in places. I mean, the main character works at a family diner, baking cinnamon buns as big as your head. There are lines like the one about the werechickens. I've always loved McKinley's sense of humour, and it's all through this book.
The reason I want her to write more is that there's so much here that's great, and this book only begins to explore it. Like the main character's father. We find out who he is, and more or less why he's important, but why? What's going on with his family? What's going on with Mel? What's going to go on with the main character? And McKinley's set up a magic system that I find really interesting; it starts with a fairly commonplace notion of people having an affinity for some element (fire, water, etc.) but then it takes that notion to some unusual places. Then she adds in all the stuff about wards and how they behave and why tattooing them into your skin is useful but highly dangerous, and I really really want to see her come back to this setting, to these characters, and tell us more.
I don't know if she's going to. But in the meantime, Sunshine has rocketed to the position of my favorite McKinley book ever.