Review: Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 2 The Laughing Corpse by Laurell K. Hamilton

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 2 The Laughing Corpse by Laurell K. Hamilton

The Cover:

This is another cheesy cover—possibly more cheesy than the terrible Guilty Pleasures cover. It does give more information than the first cover as it indicates that there will be a lot of zombies in this book—not surprising since Anita Blake is a vampire animator.

 

The Story:

Anita Blake has three significant problems at the start of The Laughing Corpse. One, a flesh-eating zombie appears to be stalking St. Louis. Two, she’s managed to tick off a woman who is quite possibly the most powerful vaudan priestess in the country. And three, a mob-connected millionaire wants to force her to raise a zombie so old that only a human sacrifice will make it possible. That means that in the second novel in the Vampire Hunter series, the zombies are coming after Anita and it promises to be a thrilling chase.

 

And that’s what makes this book such a great novel. Guilty Pleasures was all about the vampires, but The Laughing Corpse gives us a chance to understand much more intimately who Anita Blake truly is. She is filled with a power that lets her raise the dead from their graves and put them back again and now we get to see both the dangers in her vocation and what true evil can be done with the powers at her command.

 

Not that the vampires are completely missing. Jean Claude is now Master of the City and he hasn’t forgotten that Anita is his Human Servant even if she denies this and wants him to suffer a bit of amnesia. Around the edges of the story, we see Jean Claude begin to tighten the screws on Anita as he strives to assert his dominion over all the vampires of St. Louis. You see, he has tied Anita to him and he can’t afford to look weak by not forcing her to act as his servant—but Anita would quite literally prefer to die than be his slave. Not that Anita is the sort of person who lays down and dies—she makes it very clear that she’s willing to kill Jean Claude to get him back out of her life even if he is the sexiest man she’s ever met.

 

The vaudan priestess, Senora Dominga, is one of the scariest villains Hamilton has yet created. She’s human—but she could give the monsters graduate courses in how to be evil. And unlike Anita, she feels absolutely no constraints to follow the law. If she sees profit and thinks she won’t be caught, she will do anything.

 

The storyline satisfyingly ties together the disparate problems confronting Anita at the beginning of the book, and in the resolution, Anita gets the first glimpse of the power that has attracted Jean Claude to her. Anita might be one of the good guys, but if she’s a paladin, she’s one who fights in shadows not the brilliant light of day. It’s a lesson Jean Claude needs to take to heart as well. Push her hard enough and she’s capable of doing a whole lot of terrible too.

 

I went a little crazy with this series and added a continuing characters section to my review on my website. https://www.gilbertstack.com/laurell-...