Kiss the Dead (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #21) in SOS: Serious Overload of Series

Jan 31, 2012 Shannon marked it as will-never-read

Shelves: dumb-female-characters, dumb-male-characters, terrible-writing, abandoned-series, hate-this-series, abandoned-author, unnatural-character-progression

The one and only time I will ever put a gif in a review.

Edited on 5/7/12, because I apparently have more to say ...

Hit List was the end of Anita Blake for me, after reading this series for the better part of a decade, so check out my review of it to see why I'm not reading Kiss the Dead. I grew attached to the characters and the story and was thoroughly invested with these books until it just got to the point that I couldn't read them without wanting to stab myself in the eye or tear my hair

The one and only time I will ever put a gif in a review.

Edited on 5/7/12, because I apparently have more to say ...

Hit List was the end of Anita Blake for me, after reading this series for the better part of a decade, so check out my review of it to see why I'm not reading Kiss the Dead. I grew attached to the characters and the story and was thoroughly invested with these books until it just got to the point that I couldn't read them without wanting to stab myself in the eye or tear my hair out, or both. It wasn't the sex (which, even though it got ridiculous it was at least hilarious enough to be entertaining), it wasn't the plot (what little existed), it wasn't JUST the writing (though it continued to go downhill with each subsequent book), it was a combination of all of those things and more.

She's run this series into the ground and continues to milk it even though it's painfully obvious she doesn't know what she's doing with it anymore. I don't even recognize most of the characters (especially since some of the leads haven't even been IN the books for the last few) and Anita is just an awful Mary Sue who runs around in circles asking the same questions and getting into the same disagreements and adding more and more men and more and more powers to both her and others through her magical vagina. Every book ends with a couple of pages to wrap things up in an epilogue instead of using the bulk of the book for those plot points. If someone reads this book and sees my review and can prove me wrong and this one is different, I'd love to know, but any trollish comments will be deleted.

I went looking for new info about the Meredith Gentry series (yes, I still will read that one and I actually even enjoy it a little bit), and happened upon an excerpt from an outtake that was "too hot to handle" (seriously, how is that possible? Once you write tentacle and human/"childlike" goblin sex and double penetration, I ... don't want to know what "too hot to handle" could possibly mean), from Kiss the Dead. Really, how anyone can read this and not understand why she needs to get a new editor (saw on her blog she actually DOES have one, though how much she lets her editor actually EDIT is suspect), and stop writing this series until she knows what the fuck she wants to do with it is beyond me.

I finally let myself look at that face, and I felt like I had from almost the first moment I’d seen him, that he was simply one of the most beautiful men I’d ever seen. The black curls touched the edge of his face, as if bringing attention to the curve of his mouth, the line of his cheek, and those eyes. They always looked blue, but they were so dark. Midnight blue with their double edge of black eyelashes like dark lace to frame the deepest blue I’d ever seen in anyone’s eyes. His eyes were a blue like deep ocean water, where it runs cold and will eventually spill down into something warm and mysterious, where creatures the light has never seen live and thrive. Those gorgeous eyes looked at me, and there was love in them, but the second he saw me in the doorway, walking toward him, there was lust, desire, and just a heat that brought a blush to my face and an answering heat to my own eyes. Six years after we’d first started dating I was still a little amazed that this most lovely of men wanted me so badly. They talked about burning for each other, and we still did. I never seemed to get over the surprise of turning around and seeing him there. You’d think I’d get used to seeing such a beautiful man and knowing he was mine, but it never grew old, as if his beauty and the fact that he was mine, and I was his, would forever surprise me.

Hmm. I think she's trying to describe a MAN with BLUE EYES who is HERS in this scene. I'm not always great at critiquing literature, but I think that's what she was going for. Maybe.

Seriously, did you see she wrote "he was mine" twice in the same sentence? Well, good to know that this scene was cut from the book because it didn't fit in with whatever "plot" she came up with and not because it's so awful it shouldn't be published ... oh, wait, it IS being published. Instead of making this a free story on her site for whatever fans she has left, she's selling it as an ebook for $2.99. Shameful, but it doesn't surprise me at all. The only thing that still surprises me is that she has any fans left. ...more

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Sep 29, 2012 Lakisha rated it liked it

Shelves: paranormal, romance, urban-fantasy

Okay, not back to the Anita Blake I fell in love with but...a tad bit better. Had more plot and action as opposed to sex, sex, sex, random dialogue moment, sex, sex, action!

So I will stay on the Laurell K Hamilton bandwagon and keep my eyes peeled for the next one.

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