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Books : Science Fiction & Fantasy : Authors, A-Z : H : Hamilton, Laurell K.
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In some of Laurell Hamilton's excellent supernatural thrillers about Anita Blake, the Vampire Executioner, we forget that Anita raises the dead for a living, and that her involvements with the undead, the temporarily furry and the St Louis Police Department are only a sideline. In Bloody Bones, she is hired to raise the victims of some long-ago mass slaughter, a pile of dismembered arms and legs and skulls and ribs, and identify them. Her employers want to build a luxury hotel on ground claimed by the Bouvier clan as an old burial ground--and the Bouviers are not entirely human... Add to the mix murders too brutal to be obviously vampiric, a feud between Anita's vampire date Jean-Claude and the older vampire who rules the neighbouring countryside--and we have the sort of complicated mess of intrigue which Hamilton always handles so well. Anita is an interesting character because so torn between what she is, a necromancer with the power to compel the dead, and a person far too accomplished at violence, and her religious beliefs, as well as between her attraction to Jean-Claude and her love for the werewolf Richard. She is a fascinating series character because she changes so much.--Roz Kaveney
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When the vampire Master of St Louis starts an affair with the city's most notorious necromancer and executioner of vampires, it was bound to cause comment.Anita Blake finds out, in Burnt Offerings, that there is something even her lover Jean-Claude fears--and that is the Council, the body of old and magically powerful vampires who decide policy and can condemn those who question their authority to a lingering undeath of supernatural torture. Among their servants is Jean-Claude's ex Asher, who blames him for his disfigurement at the hands of the Inquisition and for the death of the woman they both loved--and Asher has a perfect vengeance in mind.
As Laurel K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series proceeds, Anita becomes ever more powerful in her magics and her capacity to control supernatural entities; she also becomes ever more sexually magnetic, and the books more erotic, as she learns to cope with life as boss of a pack of were-leopards with a taste for SM and snuggling. And as the books proceed, the stakes get higher and higher--Laurell K. Hamilton does a nice line in sheer terror, whether fear of decay or fear of the preternaturally hot fire a pyrokineticist can throw at those who offend him. --Roz Kaveney
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When Anita Blake, necromancer and vampire executioner, started sleeping with the vampire Jean-Claude, she thought she was done with her relationship with Richard, leader of St Louis' large pack of werewolves. She loves him still, but she could not cope with watching him eat a defeated enemy.When he is accused of rape in a small corrupt town out in the sticks she joins his pack-mates and his family in trying to clear his name and finds herself in trouble as usual. For one thing, Richard has made an enemy of a powerful sorcerer whose foes tend to turn up horribly dead; for another, she and Jean-Claude are trespassing in the territory of another vampire Master, one who feeds on fear and can spread a deadly rot with his touch.
As always, Laurell K. Hamilton writes well about both sexual passion and the sheer wild thrill of powerful magics--these are books written without the brake on, in which anything may happen and every climax just leads to further wonderful excess. Hamilton is good on cityscapes--here she proves herself just as accomplished with the beauty and terror of dark woods by night and the tang of blood on cold clean wind. --Roz Kaveney
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Obsidian Butterfly, the ninth of Laurell K Hamilton's Antia Blake Vampire Hunter novels, is not quite the mixture as before, concentrating as it does on Anita's occasional partnership with the stone-cold killer Edward rather than on her love for werewolf Richard and vampire Jean-Claude. Edward brings her down to New Mexico when Ted, his legal bounty hunter secret identity, is called in on an investigation he cannot handle. Some creature hitherto unknown in this world, where mere monsters are commonplace is transforming victims into skinless, bloody automata and no one has any idea why.Hamilton provides the usual thrills, moments of perverse eroticism and extreme supernatural ickiness; she also delves rather more deeply than usual into what makes her heroine tick and into Anita's fears that she may be becoming too like the sociopathic ruthless Edward for her own sanity and salvation. The stark desert terrain of New Mexico is neatly visualised--the novel's background is effectively used as a counterpoint to the heroine's fears and uncertainties. As usual, Hamilton does an effective job of delivering what her audience have come to love and, for once, she gives them a little bit more. --Roz Kaveney
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Even vampires get ill. In the sixth outing of Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, The Killing Dance, Anita's occasional boyfriend Jean-Claude, vampire Master of St. Louis, is asked to help another Master who is rotting where he stands. Anita's necromantic powers may be enough to help Sabin, in conjunction with those of Jean-Claude and of Richard, the werewolf whom she is thinking of marrying. Anita, though, has problems of her own--there is a contract out on her life and the politics of the city's were-beings are even more complicated than those of its vampires. Richard has refused to take leadership of the city's werewolf pack, because he refuses to kill its current Alpha; just by existing and having defeated them in combat, he is a threat to the authority of Max and Raina, the wolves' current rulers. And it makes things worse that he is trusted by the wererats, say, and the various independent were-creatures.Laurell K Hamilton's background in animal ethnology adds a lot to the mix in this book; Anita has to do some long hard thinking about what it means to be in love with a man who changes to wolf. --Roz Kaveney
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In Laurell Hamilton's wonderfully noir horror thrillers, Anita Blake never knows quite what is going to turn up walking the mean streets she lives on. She really does not appreciate the sexual attentions of Jean-Claude, vampire Master of the city she lives in and proprietor of the Circus of the Damned. No matter how cute he is, he is dead, and Anita gets enough of dead people in her work as zombie raiser and vampire executioner. His friend Richard strikes her as entirely more her sort of thing--sweet, polite and a high-school teacher; yet she knows with an awful inevitability that Richard probably has secrets of his own. Add to this volatile personal mix vampires with ambitions to seize Jean-Claude's throne and mount anti-human pogroms, an immortal snake-woman with agendas of her own and a hit-man with a contract on whoever the Master happens to be at the time, and Anita's problems start to be as entertaining and suspenseful as ever. Hamilton takes us to dark caverns and overlit night-clubs, and to the darker places that live inside human and formerly human sexuality--her books are terrific supernatural thrillers because she is keen to explore sexual heat as well as terror and excitement.--Roz Kaveney
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Falling in love gives you not only the problem of dealing with your lover, but of coping with their relatives. Vampire executioner Anita Blake's discovery that her new boyfriend, Richard, is a werewolf means that she has to cope with his pack and their elaborate politics of submission and domination. In The Lunatic Cafe Laurell Hamilton deals with werewolves with the same assurance that she brought to her charming, sinister vampires.Anita still has emotional baggage from her relationship with Jean-Claude, vampire Master of the city, and he is not yet done with her, even if she no longer has the marks that would eventually have made her his human servant. Someone is making snuff movies--one of the more appalling features of the alternate world Anita inhabits is that someone will always find a horrid way to make the differences between that world and ours the subject of profit--and Anita is determined to put a stop to it. And werewolves and other shape-changers are disappearing--and Anita and her PI friend Veronica are keen to find out why. This is an excellent thriller as solidly imagined when it deals with ordinary policemen as when it deals with a fairy-tale prince enchanted into a swan. --Roz Kaveney
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Like the other Anita Blake books, Narcissus in Chains is about power and responsibility, and the way that any increase in personal power ratchets up a sense of responsibility--or ought to. For much of the book, Anita, necromancer and executioner of the undead, is faced with the possibility that living dangerously has caught up with her--that one of the were-leopards whose protector she has become has accidentally infected her and that she has finally crossed the line into non-humanity. Or are the new strengths and powers she is feeling the consequence of extending the bond between her and her two lovers, the vampire Jean-Claude and the werewolf Richard? There are new and dangerous players in town and Anita is no longer sure that she can cope...Laurell K Hamilton's inventiveness with supernatural menace has still not failed her, though more of this book than usual is taken up with Anita's complicated erotic arrangements--she has come a long way in the course of this popular series from the rather prim Catholic girl with a collection of stuffed penguins. This is not one of Hamilton's best books, but enough complicatedly happens in it that those already keen will want to know more. --Roz Kaveney
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Cerulean Sins is the 11th in Laurell K Hamilton's darkly erotic, blood-soaked series featuring Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. Think Buffy with more gore and sex. Anita, for the uninitiated, is almost like a supernatural police officer, taking on cases that involve, among other things, werewolves, the-undead and all manner of other creepy things. This time around, she is asked to reanimate a corpse that holds the key to a long-ago crime but there are several beings that don't want the past dug up again. Add to the mix a lot of bureaucratic vampire politics and the arrival of a positively psychopathic female vampire and Anita, as usual, is in for an action-packed ride. It's hard to imagine hardcore Blake fans not being entertained by this latest instalment even though it focuses on the more romantic elements of Anita's relationships.Although the emphasis is once again less on the mystery and police work that made the earlier books so enjoyable, there are still plenty of developments in Anita's life that lead one to believe that, unlike a lot of her adversaries, her character has a lot more potential. With the disappearance of Buffy from the small screen, it's more than possible that many Buffy fans will migrate to this series to get their regular dose of un-dead butt-kicking action. But newer readers will be hopelessly out of their depth trying to understand the already complicated relationships and back story that so much of this book relies on. They should go back to the start and read Guilty Pleasures. --Jon Snow