Dead Ice by Laurell K. Hamilton

As long as I was catching up on Anita Blake, and the library had this book, I figured "what the heck?"

This is a 556 page novel that really could have been about 200 pages shorter, if one removed all the agonizing that Anita does over her relationships with the men and women in her life.

When it boils down to the action plots of the novel, Anita is contacted by the FBI to help them track down someone who is abusing zombies and selling zombie porn. Back in an earlier book, Anita encountered a voodoo priestess who was able to return the souls of the dead to their bodies after raising them as zombies, torturing them with awareness of their true state, and it appears someone has either discovered or re-invented the technique.

Anita also finds herself in a tough situation when a zombie she raises for a historical society to quiz turns out to be far too lifelike, and developing flesh-eating cravings. The first is a symptom of her growing powers, possibly, and the second is due to an unknown fact about the person whose body she raises.

Speaking of her growing powers, Anita's possession of pan-were capabilities begins to bleed over into the men in her life who are weres, and they discover that they are able to assume more animal forms than their "native" ones.

Anita and Jean Claude's wedding plans continue to move forward, but there's a wrinkle concerning the were tigers, who have a prophecy that the Mother of All Darkness will return if one of them is not wed to Anita, as well. So, Anita has to audition some tigers to join her menagerie.

Asher is also causing problems again, after they have allowed him to return from exile. They really ought to just send him off to Tasmania or someplace really remote.

A fairly good story, but way too much emotional angst.

Affliction by Laurell K. Hamilton

I know, I vowed not to read any more of this series, after it turned into a massive porn saga, but things were a little slow on the new books at the library front, and...

Hamilton actually managed to go on for about four hundred pages of action, before Anita got any "action", if you know what I mean.

Micah's father, who is a sheriff in a small town near Denver, gets bitten by a flesh-eating zombie and contracts a disease (hence the book title). It behaves in a manner similar to flesh-eating bacteria, and all previous cases of the disease reported have been fatal, so Anita and Micah and Nathaniel fly off to Colorado so Micah can see his father and try to reconcile with his estranged family, whom he has not seen since he was part of Chimera's menagerie.

There's a lot of family drama at first, but that is soon shoved to the background as Anita is called in to consult on the outbreak of killer zombies that turns out to have taken far more victims than anyone realizes. Flesh-eating, violent zombies are really quite rare, so she knows that some supernatural agency has to be creating them and sending them out to kill.

There's some fantastic action sequences, and some great dialogue between Anita and Marshall Ted aka Edward, the sociopath monster hunter. Anita really makes Ted's day when she asks him to bring along his flamethrower and they get to play with thermite grenades, as well.

It turns out that when (without too many spoilers) Anita killed the Mother of All Darkness and she and Jean Claude gained a whole bunch of her power, they weren't the only ones. We find out here that another of the master vampires whom Marmee Noir had attempted to possess also got a big power boost when she was killed. This, of course, gives us some food for future plots, as we see what supercharging some of the old vamps' power does to create supervillains.

This novel pushes things in a direction far closer to the things that many of us loved about the early series, and perhaps away from its focus on nothing but sex and relationships. There's still some of that around, but the violence and mystery are back a bit stronger. I'm going to brave the next book in the series.

Kiss the Dead by Laurell K. Hamilton

This is the nineteenth book in the Anita Blake series, and it gets started off in a hurry - no foreplay. Anita is interrogating a new vampire in the police station, trying to discover the location of a fifteen year old girl that his band of "free" vamps have kidnapped and are about to turn. Things get out of hand, and end up in a brawl between the vamp, Anita, and the cops, including her old pals Zerbrowski and Dolph.

It seems, though, like Hamilton is getting away from the wild and crazy monster hunting action that got me hooked on this series in the beginning, and descending into too much PNR action. She spends far too many pages describing how each and every one of her lovers looks and acts, and what Anita loves about each of them in particular. There's even more of Anita's thoughts and emotions about ...eek...relationships. I'm fairly certain that we've seen a lot of the descriptive information before, and it seems vaguely like "cheating" to get the required number of pages to fill a novel, rather than writing a strong plot with great action sequences. Of course, whenever Anita isn't busy being all girly, there's too many pages of explanation about why she's, just "one of the guys" with all her cop buddies now, and how macho men from SWAT and the U.S. Marshalls service, and the RPIT all bond as manly men.

The descriptive, romance stuff just goes on and on for pages, I'm afraid, with a minimal number of pages devoted to taking on the bad guys, who are a group of vampires who want to remain free of the control wielded by master vampires - a nice idea in theory, but impractical and dangerous in reality. There are, I think, more pages devoted to the usual graphic sex scenes - I think Anita screws more monsters than she kills in this one.

Stick a fork in me, I'm done...paying for crappy novels by Hamilton.

Hit List by Laurell K. Hamilton

Hit List is the latest (is it 19 or 20?) in the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series. I have to say that I enjoyed this one a bit more than recent books in the series, as it actually managed to go over 100 pages before the first, and only, sex scene. There was way more old-fashioned monster hunting action here, as well as some great scenes with Edward, Anita's old bounty hunter friend, and Olaf and Bernardo Spotted Horse get drafted in the last half of the book, as well.

There has been a series of preternatural murders around the country that Edward and Anita are called in to investigate, and they reluctantly come to the conclusion that the ancient, mysterious and deadly organization called The Harlequin are behind them, instigated by the MOther of All Darkness, who wants to possess Anita's body, so she can bring on another reign of terror on the world. The Harlequin are meaner, tougher and faster than most vampires and weres around today, and it's obviously going to be touch and go for Anita and Edward to catch and kill them before they catch and capture Anita.

So, Hamilton falls back on some of her old standard schtick in a few places. There's the obligatory pissing contest with the federal marshall in charge of the Seattle area, Raborne. There's the very very strange sexual tension between Anita and Olaf, the obsessive serial killer who wants to "date" her - if you call torturing her and wallowing in her blood a date. Hamilton brings out the fact that Anita is healing far faster than ordinary humans, due to her pan-were infections, which makes for an interesting setup, I think, to just how much torture she'll be able to recover from when Olaf finally gets his hands on her one day.

Perhaps there's a bit of subtle propaganda about how we treat people with infectious diseases, such as AIDS, when one of the other female federal marshalls is attacked and infected with the wolf strain, and Anita encourages her, sets her family straight, and hooks her up with the Furry Coalition for further counseling. Maybe there's even some thoughts about how minorities discriminate against other minorities within their own group who are different in some way, as reflected in the were-lions' treatment of Ethan, who has the strains of four different colors of lion in his bloodlines.

One of the downsides to this book was that it spent a lot of time building up the conflict, then, in my opinion, resolved the whole mess in about twenty pages towards the end. Seemed just a touch anticlimactic to me. Not that there's usually any shortage of climaxes around Anita Blake. With any luck at all, Hamilton is getting back to the type of story she used to tell in the early novels. I suggest that those of you who have become disillusioned with her work give this one a try, and perhaps it will encourage her to write more of these, and less paranormal romance.

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter by Laurell K. Hamilton

Since my other review today was short, here's a little something extra from the archives.

 

Review written October 1999

 

Every once in a while, I take a bit of advice from the clerk at a bookstore. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. In the case of the Anita Blake series, by Laurel K. Hamilton, I'm glad I did.
 

Gotta warn ya right up front, though, that these books are not for the squeamish. I won't say that there's grue just for the sake of gratuitous violence, but there is plenty of blood to satisfy the hard-core vampire fanz. I wouldn't recommend these books to my teenage daughter, but for the mature reader, they're darned good.

The series starts with Guilty Pleasures, winds through about six others, then (currently) ends with Blue Moon. This is another one of those series where I get the feeling I may have missed some early adventures in the pulp magazines, as there's some history that the heroine reflects upon every so often that must have a good story behind it. Or, it could be just like Zelazny's works, where he always wrote a few "out-takes" that rounded out the character, just to satisfy himself, then never published them. If you hear that they exist and where they are, let me know.

 

The stories all take place in an alternate reality St. Louis, where the creatures of horror flick and legend are "alive" and well. There are vampires, zombies, ghouls, ghosts and werecreatures galore, and they all seem to have found their niche in society. I'm thinking all through this series that there's a touch of social commentary on racial and sexual prejudices and intolerance fairly well disguised throughout Hamilton's writings. One of the main characters, Richard, is a werewolf - and he, like most of his fellow weres, lives in constant fear of being "outed" and losing his job as a junior high school teacher. People in the books also fear contracting lycanthropy through being wounded by or having sex with were-critters.

 

The heroine, Anita Blake, is a zombie raiser by trade, who just happens to also have a talent for killing vampires. She's a licensed executioner for the state, brought in as part of a special police task force whenever the supernatural is involved. Hamilton gives us just enough information about her world throughout to keep things interesting and as each novel unfolds, we learn something new about the creatures and customs of her world.

 

If I was in the mood for it, I suppose I could toss off a bunch of philosophical stuff about the metaphors, conscious and un, that Hamilton makes use of to paint a picture of a world not so far removed from our own. Suffice it to say that they're present and accounted for, and whether you're looking for a set of novels to keep you entertained with some intense dark fantasy, or for something a little deeper, it's there.

Our heroine, Anita, also goes through a lot of character growth and change, and develops her skills and necromantic powers along the way. She makes new friends and acquaintances and loses some - violently - along the way. There's a ton of unresolved sexual tension throughout the series as a menage à trois develops between Anita, the master vampire of the city, Jean-Claude, and her furry beau, Richard (ooh, strange coincidence - as I was writing this line, a frenchman named Jean-Claude walked past my desk).

 

Each novel reveals a new aspect of this alternate society. I hope I don't spoil anything for you when I say that we encounter nearly every kind of creature mentioned in dark tales at one time or another. Also, most of the villains are fully-fleshed personalities, with motivations that, tho possibly incomprehensible to us, are at least believable and well rationalized.
 
There's only a couple of flaws - first, I never get the feeling that her world is actually populated by any "normal" people, who go about their lives unaffected by the presence of legends. At least, we never meet any, jump in a taxi cab driven by one, or have our garbage taken away by another. Second, some of the conflicts that Hamilton sets up appear to have absolutely no solution - battles with invincible vampires, e.g. - but then resolve in the last ten pages quite handily.
 
I picked up Guilty Pleasures just to test the waters, then rushed out and bought the next two or three at a used book emporium nearby. Those two kept me awake a few nights, so I ended up paying full retail at an un-named book retailer for the rest. Now, I'm eagerly awaiting the next sequel. Heck of a state of affairs.

Bullet by Laurell K. Hamilton

I think that Laurell K. Hamilton has discovered a huge cash generating machine in her Anita Blake series, and recent novels in that series deliver a lot of bucks to her, but not much bang to the readers. If there's a play on words in there somewhere, given the amount of sexual content in her books recently, rest assured that it was entirely inadvertent on my part.

Spoilers and VERY ADULT concepts below.

Flirt, by Laurell K. Hamilton

The only thing that I really disliked about this book was how short it was. Not a lot of bang for the buck. At the beginning of the book, Hamilton spends a couple of pages describing and introducing existing characters, such as Micah, Nathaniel and Jason, which is ridiculous in a novel of this length. How many people in their right minds are jumping into the Anita Blake series at the 18th book and have no idea who these guys are, how important they are to Anita, etc.? When I pay top dollar for a hardback this short, don't waste my time with information I already have, please.
Anita has encounters with a couple of potential clients for Animators, Inc. in the early going, and turns both of them down for valid reasons. The first one wants his wife resurrected so that he can just be with her longer, which is going to get really icky as her zombie incarnation begins to deteriorate. The second one wants her husband brought back to life so she can punish him for his sins in their marriage. One of these scorned clients decides not to take "No" for an answer, and sends a squad of contract goons to coerce Anita into performing the desired necromancy.
Anita's interaction with the hit squad is complicated by the fact that they are werelions, and her inner lioness is still looking for a mate (see what I mean about nobody in their right mind jumping into the middle of this series; there's just way to much previous plot to cover). Things wrap up somewhat predictably. This book is just an appetizer or sidebar to the main Vampire Hunter novels.
There's a pretty good afterword included, where Hamilton talks about where she got the idea for this novel, and how it all came together. A similar process took place when she was writing Micah, another short take in the series. Anyway, if you're feeling flush, go ahead and pick this one up, but it's really a bit expensive in hardback on a cost per page basis. It was about a 45 minute read for me.