REVEIW (guilty pleasures)

I don’t date vampires. I kill them

      Gulty Pleasures

    Prod dets

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, series, book 1

Pub: 1993, Headline

Author: Laurell K. Hamilton

Cat: paranormal fiction

Format: paperback (mid); 327 pp w/ 48 chapters

Age Range: adult                                             

            Synopsis

My name is Anita Blake. Vampires call me the Executioner. What I call them isn’t repeatable.

Ever since the Supreme Court granted the undead equal rights, most people think vampires are just ordinary folks with fangs. I know better. I’ve seen their victims. I carry the scars.

But now a serial killer is murdering vampires—and the most powerful bloodsucker in town wants me to find the killer.

     my Thoughts (review)

first let’s have a talk about the series, since this is where you start one, and if you haven’t read this series before it may be interesting information that will help you decided if you want to read the series or not....

Anita Blake is an animator (she raises dead people for a living) who lives in a time when nothing is out of the ordinary and the paranormal world is out of the shadows and living next door. And they have been for some time now (I think). Anita also works in part with the police, the R.P.I.T (Regional Preternatural Investigation Team). She is also The Executioner (she’s the one they call when they want to kill a vamp—at least that’s what the vampires call her).

The vampires in the series are, well, like myth says them to be. Only we mostly see them as beautiful because of the line of vampires they come from, I suppose. The can trill you with their eyes and feed of other stuff but blood (wait! that may not be known yet, shit, I can’t remember). The shifters have to shift at the full moon, I think, but the really strong Alpha can just change their hands, some even their faces.

This series is a crime series, where the paranormals are the ones causing the crime, and Anita helps out the cops as they try and find out about what they are dealing with and then who the hells doing it.

Mach later, these books become about sex, and Anita has a lot of it, mostly because of what she’ll eventually turn into, her mind doesn’t really change all that much and she’s still a little Catholic girl at heart, which is both annoying and makes it real. Since her changing the way she is, isn’t really her.

There is lots of sex, but then Hamilton has never said anything different about her female character. She said, something about the fact that the woman, in books, never have sex—or was it that she wanted a lead that was more like the men in crime novels, where they would have sex all the time. I can’t remember it was a long time ago that I even read her talking about that. anyway, there is lots of sex, sometime more sex than anything else in the book, and it can get a bit too much, at least with what you are use to threw the series, but it doesn’t full last.

A few months back—or was it a year?—I was reading about what you shouldn’t put in a book, and it seems that Hamilton went for it all. There’s sodomy (more talking about it than the actual act) and bestiality (a little) but mostly it’s just sex. One female with multiple males in the one bed, at the one time, sometimes to a point that makes you unsure about what the hell’s happening, and even more so you questioning the possibility of it ever happening that way.

Okay, um...I think that’s enough of—no wait. the only other thing that I have a problem with threw the series, is the fact that she overly explains what people look like, and it’s not just the once, but she does this threw all her books, every single time that person pops up it’s got a half a page to explain what they look like. But it’s not annoying enough to make you not want to read it, just thought I’d add that little bit of a bitch.

So now, let’s talk book 1! Finally! Yeah, I know, but I’m doing a series thing that it’s some of the shit you need to know, I think.

So, we meet Anita, she’s in a meeting with a newly changed vampire who she knew when he was human (which she finds disturbing), he wants her to do a job for his boss (or at least the vamp that changed him, the one that turns them, owns them, unless they can get enough power under them to pull away), she rejects him, but later that night gets caught up into the scene because of a friends friend who Anita will hate from that day forth (really, it’s her thing). So she has no chose but to work for the vampire.

That’s pretty much it, she hunts, she finds; she brings down the queen bee, with the help of some pretty scary ‘friends’.

Okay, so I’ve mentioned Anita, so that’s done. She’s a heard ass woman who needs no one or nothing. At least that’s what she tells herself.

We also meet: Jean-Claude; he’s the vampire that puts his marks upon Anita so that she would be whole—we learn about him, and get his description, but we don’t really see much of him, not outside of dreams that is. The Rat King; who becomes a great deal of help towards the end of the book. Edward; a assassin who helps Anita train a little, but wants her to tell him where the master of the City is, because he’s got a hit on her. Phillip; a human vamp junkie, who helps Anita with information she needs to find the killer. Bert; her boss at Animator Inc. Dolph & Zerbroski; cops. Willy; newly turn vamp I was tellin’ you about above. That’s all I think.

Anyway, this book obviously has Anita winning, it lets us learn a little about the world that she lives in, and, well, if your still interested in the whole deal, than it’s something you should pick up and try out, really, it’s a great series, if you can stomach it. The blood is thick, the sex is dirty, but at the end of the day, it’s life, and what’s the fun in life if everything was clean?!

Series

[tb], the Laughing Corpse, Circus of the Damned, The Lunatic Cafe, Bloody Bones, The Killing Curse, Burnt Offerings, Blue Moon, Obsidian Butterfly, Narcissus in Chains, Cerulean Sins, Incubus Dreams, Micah, Danse Macabre, The Harlequin, Blood Noir, Skin Trade, Flirt, Bullet, Hit List, Kiss the Dead,

☼☼☼