Occultober Day 6: Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter by Laurell K. Hamilton
Occultober Day 6: Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter by Laurell K. Hamilton
When Laurell K. Hamilton published Guilty Pleasures in 1993 there weren’t a lot of other books like it out there—now the urban fantasy genre is packed full of tough female protagonists who go toe-to-toe with the undead and other supernatural beings on a regular basis. With Guilty Pleasures and the following books, Hamilton helped to establish the modern urban fantasy subgenre. The first novel and its immediate sequels have all of the components generally thought of as urban fantasy. The setting is a recognizable United States of America with the big change being that supernatural creatures are known to exist and society is trying to wrap its head around the implications that result from that. There’s a touch of romance, but the basic story is about our heroine, Anita Blake, and a mystery/adventure involving the supernatural side of her world. The stories are gritty and very violent with much of the excitement being the uncovering of this alternate world.
Urban fantasy series are not static and Hamilton’s Anita Blake has evolved tremendously since its ground breaking beginning—an evolution which has pulled her far away from her “I don’t date vampires, I kill them,” beginnings. The middle part of the series involves Anita being infected with a supernatural condition called the ardeur and needing to feed succubus-like on lovers to survive. She also gets increasingly confused as to whether the vampires and the werewolves are all bad guys. By the final third of the books, she’s become something the Blake of Guilty Pleasures would have hated, but the world is not black and white to Anita anymore.
I started reading these books in 2001 just before Hamilton made her first shift in the direction of the novels. Like most authors (maybe all of them) a good book/series gets me thinking about how I would do a spin off, or what character I would insert into this world to add some excitement without stealing the thunder from the main already-established characters. More important yet, Blake’s adventures made me seek out a lot more urban fantasy novels and eventually led me to write a bunch of urban fantasy books myself. I can’t give the Anita Blake series total credit for that interest, but it certainly greatly strengthened my appreciation for and love of the genre.
When Hamilton’s interest changed, my enjoyment in the series diminished. It started to change right after Obsidian Butterfly (the single best novel of the series) and went off the deep end with Cerulean Sins. The love triangle and the mystery/adventures that had dominated the first books just didn’t seem to interest Hamilton anymore and so Anita Blake got infected with the ardeur and suddenly needed to have sex with seemingly every man she met. If she didn’t feed, really bad things happen. Since Anita Blake had always been interested in monogamous relationships, this new power was emotionally difficult for her to handle, but handle it she did and book after book became much more about sex and the emotional baggage that came with it than how she would defeat the latest threat to St. Louis and the world. Frankly, I found the change disappointing and off-putting. These passages always felt like distractions from the plot of the story and I always felt like the novels would have been better if the actual sex had happened behind closed doors. But, based on reviews I was reading, I did what most people did. I skimmed through Hamilton’s new obsession as I sought out the nuggets of plot that had originally attracted me to the series.
Eventually, Hamilton got interested in plot again and sex began to take up a smaller percentage of the story. To be fair, the series lost me before the transition and I stopped buying the books, but every once in a while I’d pick one up in the library and see that worthwhile things were happening again. Based on the number of books in the series, it’s about time for Hamilton to change it up again. I wonder which direction she will take it.
