Anita Blake, from looking into the abyss...to, um, dating it

March 21 to March 29, 1976 I read:

A Family Affair, Rex Stout
Science Fiction in the Cinema, John Baxter
A Comprehensible World: On Modern Science and its Origins, Jeremy Bernstein
My note: A real name dropper—no memory of this book.


Definitely a more frivolous reading week.

March 21 to March 29, 2006, I read:

Micah, Laurell K. Hamilton

Interesting. Very short, it’s like a micro-Anita Blake book. It's padded out to near book length with a teaser chapter in the back for Danse Macabre, the next full-length Anita Blake book.

One rare element of the early Anita Blake books was the detachment with which she could present highly gory vampire attacks and zombie slaughter scenes. The result was that this squeamish reader didn't get, as they say "squicked out." I miss the police procedural aspects, and the camaraderie Anita had established with the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team officers, Sgt. Dolph Storr and company. They don't show up in the books much at all anymore.

I still like the Anita Blake character enough to keep reading about her—even though she seems like she’s becoming increasingly high maintenance. From the first book, Anita had a chip on her shoulder, which made her almost literally a loose cannon, considering all the weaponry she carried around. Now she has mellowed--perhaps due to having sex four or five times a day... Not intentionally... It was a sort of a vampire attack, "curse of terminal horniness" thing, see? And it's kind of turned into a lifestyle choice. Never mind. The long and short of it is, she has to take off the shoulder holster much more often these days.

Perhaps due to the strain of scheduling all this lust, Anita in the more recent books seems to often get bent out of shape about oddly trivial things. For example, a great deal of the tension in Micah, an admittedly very short piece of prose, revolves around Anita throwing an unprovoked hissy fit because lover du jour has the temerity to book them into a four-star hotel. It used to take a full-scale zombie attack to get her that upset. This book does have a zombie attack…well, I don’t want to put in a spoiler, but clearly her domestic situation is affecting her work. High maintenance. Or maybe after a dozen books full of gory monster attacks, she's dealing with a major case of post traumatic stress syndrome.


Every Which Way but Dead, Kim Harrison

Coincidentally, this is--oh, my gosh, I guess you’d call it a “paranormal romance.” Yikes! The author is definitely being marketed to the same audience as Hamilton, and there are some interesting similarities. Rachel Morgan is a witch, who runs a sort of paranormal detective agency with a vampire and pixie as partners and roommates. She lives in an alternate future where a genetic mutation has killed off enough humans to shift the balance so that magical creatures no longer have to hide, but can exist openly with humans in an uneasy truce. Lots of high stakes action: the opening scene has Rachel conjuring a demon who saved her life and to whom she now owes a debt. The demon plans to take her soul and drag her into the “ever-after” as his apprentice. There are some fast-moving action scenes in the book, but the general pace of it is more gentle and measured than Laurell K. Hamilton books—which, at their best, grab you by the throat and don’t let go.

I like Kim Harrison's prose. I read the first two books in the series: Dead Witch Walking and The Good, the Bad and the Undead, and I will probably read whatever she writes.