Laurell K Hamilton

If the Anita Blake series is Hamilton's talents in full flower, then Nightseer is little more than an amateurish first novel that attained publishable status by virtue of the author's later success. It is not so much a bad novel as it is an embarassing one; clumsy and awkward and heavy-handed like a teenager's first dates, the occasional moments of skillful writing are not worth wading through the adolescent wish-fulfillment. Only a completist should consider this one.

Blue Moon begins an exploration into Anita's magical side. Between raising the dead, which she has pretty much had under control, and the new powers brought by the vampire marks of Jean-Claude and her status as lupa to the werewolves, Nimir-Ra to the wereleopards, Anita has a lot of unresolved issues on her plate. Her trip to Tennessee to save Richard's reputation from being permanently furred will force her to confront her feelings for him as well.

The end result is that Blue Moon is a book of beginnings. The series is changing directions, as evidenced in later books, and the change begins here but is not consummated (so to speak) until later on. Anita is placed in the middle of a monster-politics crisis, and forced to rely on her own strengths and powers, rather than acting as a powerful second fiddle to Jean-Claude or Richard.

Unfortunately, the writing maintains a sense of distance from the characters, making it difficult for the reader to become emotionally involved in their trials. Important choices are being made, but the choices seem pushed by the authorial hand rather than freely chosen.

If it were not for the plot development that occurs, this book could be safely skipped. As it is, fans of the series should definitely read through it at least once. Casual readers need not do so.

Cerulean Sins continues the annoying tradition of more sex and angst, less violence.

This is the first Anita Blake novel where monster politics are the driving force behind the entire plot, rather than an obstacle placed in the way of solving a supernatural murder. Even the assassination plot that drives events is given less time than the political consequences of those events and of Anita's growing involvement in non-human society. There is as well an emphasis on the erotic nature of Anita's relationships and the powers of the vampires and werewolves.

The various plot threads are entertaining, but the novel does not weave them together intricately; the characters are driven by events only incidental to the plot, with the various crisis points being resolved almost by accident. It's a style of writing that works well for books focused on relationships, but works less well for mysteries;

Without engaging in spoilers, this novel is the last one in the series that doesn't qualify as soft-porn in sections and soap-opera in others. It's a good read for everyone, but if you are the sort of person who prefers to avoid explicit sexuality for a significant component of your novels, this is the place to stop.

The novels from this point in the series forward are more erotic in tone, and the driving force for most events is the romantic triangle of Jean-Claude, Richard, and Anita rather than the supernatural-murder-mysteries that have been the primary focus of each book up until now. (Those mysteries are still present and sometimes play a primary role in the plot, but less time is spent on those than on resolving the relationship questions).

The following books are by no means bad, or poorly written, and they certainly have redeeming value. However, the increase in sexual content is a distinct flaw in comparison to the earlier books.

If Obsidian Butterfly provided a vacation from Anita's insane sex life, Narcissus in Chains is proof that it was only a vacation. Almost the entire plot of this novel revolves around sex and monster politics; the formulaic murder mystery is little more than an incidental sketch, and the new type of monster -- werehyena -- is sufficiently absurd to ruin any sense of threat. Any monster whose howl is a barking laugh just doesn't come across as threatening.

The novel is written as if the author as only recently become aware of real-world sado-masochistic practices and seeks to explore them, but is still unaware of anything deeper than the outer layers of costume and props. There is no depth to the story, no subtlety. Anita has long ago crossed the line from injecting her sexuality into the novels by implication, as a subtle undercurrent to a murder mystery, and is now allowing it to define her actions.

Unfortunately, certain characters are introduced here that will reappear, and in fact play major roles in future books. For that reason, anyone intending to stick with the series should read this book. However, I recommend reading it from a library, or borrowed from a friend. Nothing that happens is worth actually buying a copy.

It's said that some authors like to torture their characters. This book is proof that that's sometimes true. The council's visit is an excuse for them to do their best to break Jean-Claude's friends and followers by whatever means they feel necessary, up to and including torture.

If you think that this isn't exactly a model government, you wouldn't be wrong. But it makes for an interesting novel, if a bit sadistic at times.

The gore level here has been turned down a notch, but the eroticism is present and stronger than before. Unlike later novels, the plot is driving events, rather than Anita's sexuality. This keeps things to a bearable level, especially as there are interesting new vampires to contend with.

The police murder mystery in Burnt Offerings involves, unsurprisingly, arson. Other than that it's fairly standard, with the needs of the investigation forcing Anita to play with the monsters more than she would prefer. Her involvement with the lycanthropes increases as well, as their aid becomes a necessary part of her power base. The attendant touchy-feely is kept to a minimum and Anita's complaints about such are mostly muted.

And following the events of the previous book, Anita's relationship with Dolph is more than a little strained.

Overall, it's definitely not the best of the series, but it's solid.

Having established Jean-Claude as Master of the City in Circus of the Damned, in The Lunatic Cafe the attention shifts to Richard... Richard, Anita's science teacher and romantic interest... as well as beta wolf to Marcus in the local werewolf pack by way of a bad batch of lycanthrope vaccine. And while Anita learns to deal with her beloved getting furry once a month, she's handed a missing-lycanthrope case and a naga skin.

The Lunatic Cafe is the first of the Anita Blake novels to pay significant attention to the werewolf population. It's a whole new world for Anita, and for the readers as well, but it all fits together very well; Hamilton manages to invent her own rules while keeping the reader feeling as if they are only discovering the reality behind the legends.

And those rules work. The lycanthropes are just as alien, just as terrifying, just as monstrous, as the vampires... while still retaining their own unique qualities and flavor, both as a type of creature, and as individuals. Or, in other words, some werewolves are assholes, and others are quite friendly -- but they'll all eat you for dinner if they happen to be hungry and you look tasty.

This novel is definitely one of the better Blake novels, with the introduction it provides to a new segment of supernatural society and the political conflicts within the lycanthrope society becoming a concern. It is also the first to begin hinting towards a larger plot underlying the episodic nature of the books.

This novel is well worth a read, although vampire junkies will find somewhat less sustenance here compared to the first three novels. In my view, however, this represents a broadening of the series and its possibilities rather than a limitation.

This novel gives us an in-depth view of Edward's daily life, and some quite tantalizing hints of how he became who he is now. And although Anita's methods are more direct, and the role of monster politics in the series is less pronounced, there is no shortage of horrific events. Anyone prone to (and bothered by) highly-visual nightmares would be advised to skip this one. Ditto for those with a particular affinity for children -- or sensitivity to children being harmed. Some of the events in this book touch on normally taboo topics, although the depictions are not especially graphic by the standards of this series.

But if you can stomach the actions of the villians, this is one of the best of the Anita Blake novels. The largest complicating factors in Anita's life are absent, leaving her personal life mostly a non-factor. (Strange as it seems, Edward's personal life does become a factor). The plot is narrowly focused around the monster killings that Anita has been called in to solve, with a minor subplot that becomes predictably entangled with the primary storyline.

Rather than the more European mythology that Anita's adventures have usually encountered, Obsidian Butterfly is set in the southwest and focuses on the Aztec mythos. There is no shortage of interesting material there.

Anyone reading the series for the eroticism should skip this one. Otherwise, it comes highly recommended, especially for Edward fans.

Anita Blake and Jean-Claude struggle to sort out their love lives as a rogue pack of vampires moves into town, determined to take over the reins from the new Master of the City -- and not incidentally, to leave a few corpses for the police to investigate in the process. What sounds like the plot of a novel is only another day in Anita's harried life, and it doesn't get any easier from there.

To investigate the murders, Anita is forced to descend into the world of the vampires once more. Jean-Claude is ever willing to help, but his help comes with the price of his company: deadly, seductive, and more tempting for our heroine than any vampire has the right to be. Yet the vampire marks that have saved Anita's life in the past have also bound her to Jean-Claude, at risk of her soul.

Circus of the Damned takes Anita deeper into vampiric society, and tangles her deeper into Jean-Claude's tangled plots. Anita knows from experience that the Master of the City is monstrous... but what about the alterative? Is the vampire you know better than the vampire you don't?

There are problems with this novel which show up mainly in retrospect; the power level of the opposition is too high, relative to the degree of perceived threat. There are continuity problems with respect to the powers that are used. However, those problems are present primarily in retrospect; they do not pose a problem to the enjoyment of the book itself. Nor are they major problems with the series. The book remains a good read, and the minor flaws are the sort that only matter in a series with pretensions towards Literary Merit -- pretensions which the Anita Blake series wants nothing to do with.

Anita Blake is back, and this time she's asked to sort out a murderous zombie while convincing Jean-Claude, the vampire Master of the City, that dinner and a movie really aren't in her schedule, especially not when the undead are asking. And as if that wasn't enough, one of her clients wants her to raise a someone from the dead... someone long enough in the grave to require a human sacrifice.

Hamilton's trademark combination of wit, gore, and gender-neutral macho are here in spades. Anita is forced to play sleuth in a world that grows more interesting with each novel; with vampires counted as citizens in full possession of legal rights, black magic not only functional but publically recognized (complete with automatic death sentences for "murder by magic"), the resolution of conflicts between humans and monsters becomes a matter for careful footwork as well as firepower.

The villians Anita faces are spine-tingly chilling, her allies are sometimes scarier than her enemies, and her best friend is a cold-blooded assassin. The eroticism that mars later books in the series is absent here, leaving the plot and characters free to shine. This is pure, clean, undiluted fun.

Guilty Pleasures is the first novel in a long-running series. The novel is set in a world very like our modern world, with a few minor differences: primarily the strong presence of the supernatural. In fact, that presence is so strong that vampires have been granted legal rights, a vaccine has been developed for lycanthropy, and degrees in "preternatural biology" are not unknown.

Anita Blake is making her way in the world through the use of her supernatural talents; specifically, her ability to raise the dead as zombies. While what might seem a talent limited only to halloween to some, Anita (along with the other employees of Animators, Inc) has found exotic uses for her abilities. Everything from zombies testifying in court to clear up the intent of their will to abused children getting one last chance to chew out their parents has come up. But that is the most mundane part of her duties.

Anita is also the registered vampire executioner for the city of St Louis. When a fanged menace goes rogue, it's her job to track down the criminal and put a stake through its undead heart. In order to facilitate that, she works closely with the local police's preternatural crimes unit.

So it should hardly come as a surprise that Anita is at the top of the list when someone -- or something -- starts killing the local vampires. But the vampires aren't exactly human themselves, and their power struggles cover centuries. It's easier to get in then it is to get out.

Guilty Pleasures starts off good and stays there. Any fan of vampire fiction will want to drain this book dry, along with most of its followup novels. Although this is the first novel in a series, readers should not be dismayed by the prospect of cliffhanger endings or a long committment: each novel in the series is written to stand alone, while also advancing the overall plot.

The writer is a skilled descriptive linguist, capable of evoking visceral and bloody horror with a great deal of power. This novel and this series is not for the squeamish! Blood drips from walls, soaks into carpets, and corpses are eaten by supernatural beasties. But fans of subtle shading and character development will not find Anita Blake's universe lacking in either. There is much to appreciate and enjoy throughout the series, and this novel is an accurate taste of the overall flavor.

Readers should be warned to expect a significant component of eroticism to the series. In the first 6 novels, the erotic element is muted; it exists in the interplay between the characters and the nature of the vampire's powers rather than explicit sexuality. The later novels, however, border upon soft-porn and the trend appears to be consistent. If that's not your cup of tea, read the series until you find it's not worth it anymore; because each novel stands alone you won't be left with a cliffhanger to trap you into reading the next book just to learn the ending.

The usual refrain is to not judge a book by its cover, but in many cases, you can do exactly that. Publishers pick books for two reasons: first, they want to sell the book; and second, they want to accurately represent its contents, so the people buying the book won't be disappointed or overly surprised at what they find. Good cover art doesn't necessarily make a good book, but cover art emphasizing sex usually means the same emphasis is present in the prose.

Incubus Dreams is, in that sense, perfectly predictable. The cover emphasizes sex, and so does the prose. In terms of sheer pagecount, most of the book is made up of explicit sex scenes. There's sex with werecats, sex with werewolves, sex with vampires, sex with penetration, sex without penetration, sex in a car, sex with bondage, sex with a flogger, sex with police witnesses, sex with two men at a time, sex with a different two men at a time, sex with metaphysical purposes, sex just for the sake of sex, sex in an office, sex in a different office, and undoubtedly many subtle variations on the theme that I can't quite recall.

Quite frankly, the few scenes that didn't involve sex take up perhaps a total of 10 chapters. Into those 10 chapters Anita somehow fits a murder mystery, a wedding (no, I'm not saying whose), and a whine about amorality. No, there isn't room to cover any of the those things in detail, what with all the sex.

If you're beginning to get the impression that I didn't like all the sex, you'd be right. It wasn't badly written by any means, but there's just too much of it, and it long ago ceased to be interesting. Unfortunately, it seems that sex is a plotting mechanism for Anita these days; so much of the story revolves around it that no progress can be made without it.

One of the larger meta-plot issues in recent books has been Anita's sexual and romantic hangups. Fans have been rooting for her to get over those hangups for a long time now, because it's been interfering with her real work -- investigating murders and slaying vampires. In some respects, Incubus Dreams is about Anita's struggle to finally deal with those hangups rather than whine about them. In that respect, the book represents a significant turning point.

Unfortunately, that turning point is towards more, rather than less, sex. Most fans wanted Anita to get over her hangups so she would stop whining about them, not merely so they could read even more pointless semi-erotica.

Frankly, the amount of actual, non-sexual plot in this book was embarassing by any measure. It's not badly written, it's just far, far too much. I've been telling myself for a while that I would stop reading the Anita Blake series if the books didn't stop their headlong descent into pornography, and this one is the last straw. I do not expect I will purchase the next book.

On the other hand, if you've been reading Anita for the sex, by all means, you'll love the book. Have fun.

Who do you call when you have a mass grave that's two centuries old and you want to raise them all from the dead? Anita Blake, of course. No one else can do it. But it's never as simple as that.

Where The Lunatic Cafe served to broaden the Anitaverse to include lycanthropes, Bloody Bones reaches into a different sort of mythology: fairy tales. Specifically, the Faerie, cold iron and four-leaf clovers and bad nursery rhymes and all. But if you were expecting nice nature-loving creatures with pointed ears, this isn't your book.

Historically, faeries resided somewhere between arrogantly neutral to actively cruel; they started at shades of dark grey and got a lot worse quickly. Faeries in the Anitaverse are the same way.

Aside from the mass grave and the faeries, Bloody Bones forces Anita to deal with what may be the first vampiric serial killer on record. And as usual, calling Jean-Claude for help gets her in even more trouble with the local vampires, who don't like being dropped in on by surprise.

This is the first novel in the series where the formulaic nature of the novels becomes noticable. Once again, the plot revolves around a mixture of monster kills and monster politics, with the odd hostage situation and a bit of romantic tension between Anita and her two romantic interests to spice things up and a newer, more powerful master vampire to contend with. Still, the addition of the Faerie is a new element that prevents the formula from interfering with the enjoyment of the story.

The degree of gore present in this novel is lower than in most of the others. Of course, it's hard to top bodies chewed up and eaten, bodies with pieces missing, blood-soaked carpets, blood-soaked teddy bears... after all the blood soaking, it's almost a relief to get a relatively small number of relatively undamaged bodies.

One of the more interesting side issues that is brought up by this novel is the interaction of the law with regard to new vampires being "brought across". How do you apply the age-of-consent laws to death by vampire bite? How do you deal with the dead body that will be waking back up after 3 nights? What if the parents want the body staked rather than letting it rise?

Not easy questions, and not easy answers.

Overall, the story is well-told and interesting enough in the details that the formulaic nature of the plot is forgiveable. There's no reason to avoid this novel, and a number of good reasons to read and enjoy it.