Anita Blake

       I have to start out with one of the authors who did not just inspire me, but can also be considered the mother to an entire genre:

Laurell K. Hamilton

This woman’s Anita Blake series was one of my first inspirations for my original fiction. Reading her was a real treat because her heroine was a tough name-taking woman who wasn’t perfect but did her best and got the job done. 

 

 

"I know who and what I am. I am The Executioner, and I don't date Vampires. I kill them." –Anita Blake

  

The first book in the Anita Blake series was Guilty Pleasures. It brings us into the middle of the life of Anita. The novel is written in the first person so we experience everything that happens to her through her eyes with her often sarcastic and always humorous commentary.  The book starts quickly, taking you into a day in the life of Anita where the reader learns that she is animator, someone who raises zombies, that she is on retainer for St. Louis’s supernatural police, and that she is also now a legal vampire executioner. Anita ends up getting blackmailed by the current master vampire of the city, the forever pubescent  Nikolaos, into investigating vampire murders happening around the city. This investigation requires Anita to use her quick thinking and skill as she tries to avoid the advances of Jean-Claude, another master vampire, and face off with enemies who are stronger and faster than she is. Anita manages to triumph at the end, but her victory is not without consequences.

Besides the plot and Anita’s snarky comments, it was the little things in the book that made me love it:

1.       The World-Building- You learn very quickly that in this alternate universe so much like our own, vampires, werewolves, zombies, and all other manner of creatures that go bump in the night exist. And vampires have recently gained citizenship.  Necromancers, called animators, are paid to raise the dead for legal matters.  And that werewolves are victims of lycanthropy, a disease that is beyond their control.

2.       The Murder Investigation- The Anita Blake series is often put into horror section and this is one of the reasons why. Anita spares no detail when she’s investigating a crime scene; if she’s about to throw up or thinking about throwing up, you are going to know which piece of gore has caused it.

3.       Death- Not death the eventual mortal state, but Death the person. Edward was one of my favorite characters, an unapologetic sociopath willing to work on the side of ‘good’ for a price or challenge. 

Anita Blake came at the right time into my life. I had just finished reading the Night World series by L.J Smith(the predecessor of all things Twilight), and was looking for vampires. Anita Blake definitely filled my quota and then some. Since then, Guilty Pleasures and a few of Hamilton's other books have been made into comics.

 

"Guilty Pleasures treads a thin line between entertainment and the sadistic.  The Circus goes over the edge and down into the abyss.  And here I go inside.  Oh, joy in the morning." - Anita