Laurell K. Hamilton

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter — (1993-2011) There are omnibus editions of these available. Publisher: Introducing Anita Blake, vampire hunter extraordinaire. Most people don't even bat an eye at vampires since they've been given equal rights by the Supreme Court. But Anita knows better — she's seen their victims... A serial killer is murdering vampires, however, and now the most powerful vampire in town wants Anita to find the killer.

The Killing Dance: LKH really blows it on this one.

I enjoyed Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter up to this point, but LKH really blows it on this one. Anita has turned into a hypocrite and any claim she had to integrity was shredded within the first 3 chapters of the next book. Hamilton has destroyed her main character — Anita is turning into a nasty tramp. We are talking about a complete reversal of the sharp-edged but relatively moral person she started out as. What a shame.

I should admit that The Killing Dance must have been well conceived and written because it really affected me — I was utterly devastated. —John Hulet

Narcissus in Chains: I was happier when Richard was out of the picture

Like an addiction to pain, I have kept reading Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter despite having some serious issues with what Laurell K Hamilton has done with her characters. She seriously pisses me off with the way that she is developing the Richard-Anita relationship.

Anita has turned from a virtuous woman into a tramp. She just keeps getting worse and her apparent ability to get past becoming a whore is just ridiculous. Her ability to remain a true believer despite all the dark forces at work has been one of her truly redeeming characteristics.

This series is turning into a soap opera and if you are ok with that, then cool. Anita is changing, so if you liked her in the first books you may not care for her now. I know that I don't, but I keep reading just hoping that she will get hers in the end. —John Hulet

Cerulean Sins: Someone needs to give LKH some help

Cerulean Sins is book 11 in Anita Blake's story and Anita is disgusting at this point. Whatever the excuse, she is a total tramp and has finally embraced it. That is so ridiculous for a character who kept Richard and Jean-Claude waiting for months without giving in to them. Maybe Laurell K. Hamilton's editor told her that the books need more sex to be interesting because there is no good explanation otherwise.

The storyline is still interesting if you just want to know how things will turn out, but any respect that I have left for most of the characters is wearing thin as the moral climate of the entire preternatural community has degenerated.
—John Hulet

Incubus Dreams: Yuck! Typical for the most recent books

LKH has continued down the path that she has chosen for this series: the characters just get trashier with each book and all of the redeeming features that made them respectable are disappearing.

The sad part is that it is such a flawed perspective on people. Some people are actually able to resist being corrupted by outside influences and that is totally absent from this series where everyone is so caught up in a need for sex and power that they will totally debase themselves to get it. The will to resist that call was part of what made Richard Zeeman admirable, but now he is so enraptured with Anita that he is falling too. Get real!

Hamilton's editors should have helped her avoid some of the chracter clutter and useless dialogue in Incubus Dreams. Kill Richard off or let him vanish into the sunset. Give Micah a backbone, because there is no way that he is a Nimir-raj like he is. He would get walked all over by a stronger personality. Jason would have been dead meat after the games he has played between the Pack and Anita and there would be nothing she could do about it. Nathaniel is just digusting and the whole infatuation thing that LKH has with him makes me want to gag. The creation of yet another triumvirate when the first one was still not well explained was another example of events taking the place of a planned storyline.

There is so much potential in this series, but it just seems like LKH is bent on destroying everything that made Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter worth reading. I have hated many of the plot turns, but they made sense in the earlier books. Now it seems like Hamilton is lost and feels like she can keep the readers interested by taking things further down the porn road than along the occult/vampire road. Bad choice.
—John Hulet

Blood Noir: Too much drama, too little actual plot

I probably shouldn't be plodding on through this series at all. I haven't truly enjoyed an Anita Blake book in years. Lack of editing hasn't done the series any favors, and while I don't mind sex in novels, Laurell K. Hamilton still hasn't figured out that sometimes you can gloss over periods of time when nothing much is happening plotwise. ("Three weeks later...")  I don't need a play-by-play every time the characters get it on. It just fills up pages and crowds out the plot. I miss the days when her novels spanned several weeks or months of time, and when the plot filled out the whole book rather than being sandwiched around the endless sex.

Due to my longing for plot, it took me a little while to realize that Blood Noir isn't actually very good. I was so pleased to see a story, I didn't notice at first that it wasn't a very interesting one.

Blood Noir starts out with some sex, in which Nathaniel completely breaks BDSM protocol but no one seems to mind, and in which Anita tells Jason that when his girlfriend only wanted to have sex in the bed, she was killing his spirit. Then Anita proceeds to have sex with Jason. In the bed. That spirit-killing wench! Then, Jean-Claude gets emo about how his family is dead so he can't take Anita to meet them. (Since when was Jean-Claude an angstbunny?)

Moving on to the plot, it's a drama-laden mess of lookalike cousins, rabid paparazzi, and a paternity twist that I saw coming several hundred pages before anyone in the story figured out the obvious. Then — I forget exactly how — Anita gets tangled up with some weretigers and gains another power-up, as if this woman needed any more powers.

A few positive points: Blood Noir helped cement my theories as to what Marmee Noir is trying to do to/with Anita. Also, Anita gets a short scene in which she actually gets to kick some butt.

However, ultimately, Blood Noir is forgettable and cheesy. I was sucked in at first by the fact that there's actually a semblance of a plot, but by the time I was halfway through the book, I was trudging.
—Kelly Lasiter

Skin Trade

Skin Trade is enough of a step in the right direction that I'm sorely tempted to give it a higher rating than it actually deserves. There's a plot! With murders! And investigating! And I turned out to be right about Marmee Noir's plans for Anita. And the two explicit sex scenes are better-written and less icky than what I've come to expect from Laurell K. Hamilton. And she's being copy-edited again, so there are only a few typos. I get the sense, reading Skin Trade, that Hamilton is trying to blend the mystery/horror style of the early Anita Blake books with the erotic style of the later installments. The results are mixed, but I have to admit that Skin Trade is her best in years.

That said, I can't say I truly enjoyed it, hence the 2-star rating. Skin Trade has its moments, and I'm quite happy that the plot never gets lost and is never far from Anita's mind, no matter what else is going on. However, there are a lot of problems.

First, there's the macho posturing. Especially in the first half of Skin Trade, Anita seems hell-bent on bickering with every male character she meets and trying to prove she's tougher than they are. The female characters don't even seem to rate that kind of treatment. Anita pretty much never gets along with any woman, ever. In one scene, she decides that a female cop is "one of those women who seem to hate other women." The woman hasn't even opened her mouth yet; how would Anita know this? Projection much? Anyway, all this bickering and posturing wouldn't be so bad if it didn't take up such a vast amount of page space. I wanted to shout at the characters to just go solve the crime already.

Second, I think Hamilton is trying to push the envelope further in terms of sex, and the results are sometimes pretty disgusting. Anita is far too friendly to creepy serial-killer Olaf (thank goodness she doesn't sleep with him) and does end up sleeping with a 16-year-old (thank goodness it's not "onscreen," and thank goodness she's disturbed when she realizes what she's done).

Third, we know that Anita is the most super-special person to ever walk the face of the planet. We get it. She doesn't need more powers, or more men, or to turn out to be one of the very last carriers of blue tiger lycanthropy (Blue tigers? What the…), but all of these occur.

Finally, several promising plotlines end anticlimactically. I hope that, in the most egregious case of anticlimax syndrome, the "end" is not as final as it seems.

There was one bit that really struck me as clever, though:

"Why?" I asked. "Everyone knows what a pain in Jean-Claude's ass I am. Why do you want to deal with that?" I couldn't call for help in any way, or someone else died. I couldn't go all lycanthrope, because it wouldn't help me. What could I do? What the fuck could I do without a gun?

He laughed again, but this time it was lower, more attractive, more seductive. "The power, Anita. You are the first necromancer in centuries, and with so many other powers."

Vittorio is answering Anita's spoken question, but in a way he's also answering her unspoken question. Indeed, Anita does end up being forced to enter Skin Trade's final confrontation without firearms, so that her powers are the only weapon she has. (That said, she has so many powers at this point, and it's been ages since she actually shot anyone, so she's probably more formidable metaphysically than physically.)

All of my grumbles aside, I really do think Skin Trade is a good start, if Hamilton intends to move the series back toward a focus on plot. —Kelly Lasiter

Flirt

I never thought I’d be nostalgic for Micah. Back then, it seemed a little much to charge mass market paperback price for a novella. Enter Flirt: a novella in hardback. This is one case where the format of the book affects the star rating. Flirt would be much more palatable in an anthology, or even as a mass market paperback. At hardback price, I can’t recommend it.

The early chapters are a mix of the interesting and the tedious. The good parts involve Anita working at her job as an animator, something we haven’t seen enough of lately. She meets two clients who want their late spouses raised from the dead. Their reasons are very different, but both are “wrong” reasons. Anita turns down both jobs. The boring parts involve Anita’s introspection about her various boyfriends, which takes up way too much page space, and the incident that inspired the entire novella: a flirtatious encounter with a waiter. As Hamilton mentions in the author’s notes that follow the book proper, this was based on a real event, but I think it was probably more interesting to live through than to read. It reminded me of being in college and thinking my late-night pancake-eating expeditions would be the stuff of great novels if I wrote them down.

The plot thickens when one of Anita’s rejected clients decides not to take no for an answer. The client will have the dead spouse raised, even if it means taking Anita hostage and threatening her boyfriends’ lives. This part of the story is actually pretty compelling. Anita crosses a couple of ethical Rubicons, but she does it with just the right amount of introspection: enough that the reader knows she’s horrified at the choices she must make, but not so much that the story gets bogged down in angst. Yet this sequence leaves the reader with a feeling of “oh no, not again” when it sinks in: Anita has added another man to her stable.

Anita’s bevy of lovers poses a huge problem in the series, and I don’t mean a moral problem, I mean a literary one. There are simply too many characters for Hamilton to juggle. Nowhere is this clearer than when Damian is briefly mentioned in Flirt. How many books has it been since we even heard Damian’s name? It’s been even longer since he did anything interesting. He seems to exist primarily as a metaphysical canary in the coal mine, signaling when Anita’s power is running low by starting to keel over dead. Yet Damian is supposed to be a major character. He’s one of Anita’s lovers, and part of one of her triumvirates. Now there’s yet another hunk in the mix. I realized, after finishing Flirt, that I’d have welcomed a tragic death for this new guy. That way, Anita could have her moral crisis without adding anyone to the regular cast.

Overall, Flirt is best seen as a quick “snack,” and mainly for those already addicted to the Anita Blake series. Get it from the library or wait for the paperback. —Kelly Lasiter

Bullet: Did Not Finish

Bullet begins with Anita slipping backstage at a dance recital. Her former friend Monica forgot the hat for her son’s costume, so Anita brings it to her, and the two women have a bit of a spat. Then, in chapter two, Anita sits down to watch the performance with her various boyfriends and —

Wait.

When I was a preteen, I used to read the BABY-SITTERS CLUB series. There’s one cardinal rule for reading BSC books: Skip chapter two. Chapter two was where Ann M. Martin always introduced the characters, describing each baby-sitter’s hair color, eye color, fashion sense, backstory, parents’ marital status... This benefited new readers, but once you’d read a few of the books it got repetitive. By the time you were a die-hard fan, not even the prospect of a new outlandish Claudia outfit could make you do more than skim this section.

After finishing chapter two of Bullet, I realized I’d just read a BSC second chapter, except with Anita’s boyfriends substituted for the club members. We learn, yet again, that Micah has green eyes and likes Italian suits, while Jean-Claude prefers leather pants, and Asher’s hair is gold (but not blond, somehow) and so on.

We move on to the ballet, and I will concede that Laurell K. Hamilton is actually not bad at writing dance scenes. But then Anita worries afterward that Jason and Nathaniel (who were in the show) can’t safely go outside in their tights and need to change clothes, because St. Louis is “the buckle of the Bible Belt” and people will think the guys are gay. Two problems with this. One, St. Louis is not even remotely the buckle of the Bible Belt. Two, THEY’RE LYCANTHROPES. I think they’re more than a match for any good ol’ boys who might fancy a spot of gay-bashing.

But anyway, eventually the characters get back to the Circus of the Damned, and the plot returns to the familiar morass of drama, sex, macho posturing, and confusing metaphysics. Continuity has left the building. Characters have undergone huge personality shifts offscreen, and bad editing means things often just don’t make sense. (Anita muses that she’s never been with anyone as long as she’s been with Micah — two years — and then reflects on her six years with Jean-Claude. Asher gets tied up, and a few pages later he’s in chains instead. Nitpicky stuff, maybe, but when there are lots of these moments in one book, they add up.) The usual tics are here, too: things tightening low in Anita’s body, more at home with the monsters than he was, werecats like to cuddle, spilling.

The sad part is, I think Hamilton herself has moments of realizing that the books have become silly, as when Bibiana asks Anita to help her tigers gain special abilities and she replies, “So I what, f*ck everyone into their next power level like some pornographic computer game?” This cracked me up. Because it’s true.

I gave up when I realized that I still had 200 pages left to go and that, quite simply, I didn’t want to read those pages. Why give up now, after weathering Narcissus in Chains’ smuttification and Incubus Dreams'typo storm? My TBR pile has grown, my free time has shrunk, and this badly edited mess is gobbling up time I could spend reading something else. Adieu, Anita. —Kelly Lasiter