She's A Very Freaky Girl

I've been reading Laurell K. Hamilton recently--the entire Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series actually. And I tell you, that Hamilton woman is a very freaky girl. And I mean that in a nice way.

Interestingly, the books in this series have changed radically, and IMHO, for the better. The first 3 or 4 books are basically like hardboiled detective novels, but with monsters instead of mere criminals. So it's a little (small and thin and consequently underestimated) woman with a really big gun who shoots things until they are dead. Each book strives to present a scarier thing to shoot--vampires, zombies, voodoo priestesses, prehistoric vampires that are about a billion years old and strong. Lots of bodies, victims, and bloody shootings.

About the middle of the series, however, Hamilton changes her focus. By that point she has assembled a large enough cast of characters, that she keeps chicking in on them, and that results in a more relationship driven book, with a monster mystery to hold the whole together. Thus we get her growing relationship with the vampire Master Of The City, her boyfriend Richard and the effects of his being a werewolf, the continued presence in her life of the people she has saved from the bad monsters.

Interestingly, she shows real strength in writing about the political consequences of these emotional attachments--what does is mean to be a mortal in a vampire world? How do you date the king of the werewolves without being one yourself? How does the pack accept you, or not?

And of course, there is more hot monkey sex.

Which makes these books the trashy pleasure they are. By the last two books of the series, Anita Blake, vampire hunter is no longer hunting vampires, but sleeping with them. And werewolves. And wereleopards. And she has this metaphysical/magical hunger thing that raises two to six times a day that has to be fed by flesh, blood, or sex. Since she's not a vampire, and she's usually surrounded by her friends, it tends to be sex.

And hot monkey sex at that.

We've seen true love sex, opportunistic sex, altruistic sex, sex with two men, two vampires, a vampire and a werewolf, wereleopards and vampires, near sex, sex without actual sex...the list is ongoing.

Hamilton has a thing for a certain look to the men in her books--lots of leather, long LONG hair, thigh high boots, thongs, that sort of thing. Things I don't particularly find attractive--ankle length hair on a man just seems untidy, if not actually off-putting.

But she writes a compelling sex scene nonetheless, and she ups the ante with the interspecies politics, plus a new murder mystery each book. Although the mysteries are starting to dwindle in importance--in the most recent book, the mystery is only sort of solved by a letter from one of the perps explaining what was going on. Not totally satisfying, so she threw in another sex scene.

Okay by me.