Fan Fiction You Have to Pay For (Laurell K. Hamilton in general)

Member Name: marysiak

Product:	Laurell K. Hamilton in general
Date:	25/06/02 (268 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: brain not required, passes the time on the bus, there's some sex and some cute vampires

Disadvantages: brain not required, you can read better for free, cliched and badly written

Anita Blake is a government sanctioned vampire executioner and can also raise the dead. The world is similar to ours if our world was full of witches, vampires, werewolves etc etc who have just gained the same rights as the rest of us.

I'd been meaning to read some of Anita Blake's books for a while as they'd been mentioned by many people in other fandoms I like. So I borrowed Burnt Offerings from a friend (I couldn't for the life of my figure out what order the books were meant to be in).

What a disappointment.

This stuff reads like fan-fiction, and not even very good fanfiction. Anita Blake is a Mary Sue, she can do everything and everyone wants her. Raise the dead, screw the city's Master Vampire, heal people (which seems to involve a lot of almost sex), fight, look cute, be sassy... excuse me while I vomit. There's also a copious amount of time spent describing what everyone is wearing at every point in the story, this is a standard fanfic bad habit. Never quite figured out why but almost every fanfic, especially the weaker and girlier ones, is obsessed with what people are wearing.

They are also painfully feminist/PC in a very tacky and clumsy way. Rape is treated as being worse than being skinned alive, personally I know which I'd rather endure! I suppose Anita is supposed to be a strong female role model or something, I think she's a bit embarassing. She's a cliche, she's uber-Buffy.

Don't bother with these books unless you're really desperate, love vampires and can switch off your brain while reading.

Further on this point (month or so later)... I just finished Bloody Bones. What can I say, I've not got much laying around to read right now. This one was definitely a better read than Burnt Offerings or maybe my standards are just being slowly eroded. I wouldn't go so far as to call this a good book though, just a better book. Her whole insistance on t
he Ms. rather than Miss Blake bugs me though. It's so petty.

Bloody Bones takes Anita out of the city, it is set before Burnt Offerings (could they possibly number these books, would it be too much to ask? I have no idea what order they go in) and the cast is smaller. It involves a little faerie lore and the usual cast of creepy, super-powered, stunningly beautiful yet utterly sadistic and perverted vampires. It comes over as a little more focussed and less self-indulgent than Burnt Offerings and I think that the fact it's set previous to it, thus meaning the characters were less powerful, helped too. It makes it less ridiculous than when they're constantly discovering new and untold levels of power over everyone else in the book.

Summary: