Disclaimer: This is not exactly spoiler-y since there’s not, like, a plot to spoil, but there are some details of Hit List ranted about below that you may want to avoid if you haven’t read it and are planning on it; though god help you if you honestly care that much.
Dear Laurel K Hamilton,
I’m not a fan. Let’s be honest. While the following is a fact that I’m extremely pained to admit – a pain, like, you have no idea, fucking tears my soul asunder -- I have read every single one of the books in your Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. I just finished your most recent installment, Hit List. I need to assure you that I have never paid for one of your books. I cannot bear the thought that any of my hard earned dollars would be filling your coffers, and possibly contributing to your false assumption that there is one more person in the world that wants you to continue to do what it is that you do … which summarily is reduced to poisoning the universe with the shittiest characters every fucking dreamed of by man or beast.
Back to Hit List. The book took me about four hours to read, cover to cover. Its brevity was undoubtedly the best thing about it. Said brevity, however, had mild surface value at best, as you have somehow managed to work some kind of black magic on the space/time continuum, insofar as that four hours was hands down the longest fucking stretch of time I have ever and possibly will ever experience. Great cities fell in that four hours. I saw the face of Lovecraftian madness and the world was fucking consumed by tentacled Old Ones in that four hours. Your book made me age, Laurel K Hamilton.
The title, first of all – what the fuck? At this point I’m longing for the times when each book was dumbly named after a location of indeterminable import in the story. It was fucking lame, but at least it made sense. There was no hit list in this book. Like, not even a haphazard one. I can see, sort of, where you maybe named the book before you wrote it. That seems very You. I mean, things are murdered? Sort of? But things are fucking murdered in all of your books, so I feel like that’s hardly a plot point relevant enough to use as the title.
And who, seriously, was asking for more of Olaf? HE IS A TERRIBLE CHARACTER. And every time you talk about him, why do you feel the need to spend THIRTY FUCKING PAGES vomiting the same shit over and over again about how he’s a serial killer and how Blake is his victim type (because Blake is everyone’s type in some way or another, amirite?) and HOMIGOD SOMEDAY HE MUST DIE? You are clearly never going to fucking kill him off, because you never fucking kill ANYONE off. You just keep inventing more and more characters whose sole purpose is to be obsessed with Anita Blake, and no one she “cares” about in return ever . fucking . dies; despite the fact that there is laughable, hyperbolic, ridiculous violence and death basically every goddamn day of these people’s miserable fucking lives.
AND WHAT THE FUCK WAS THE POINT OF THIS BOOK, ULTIMATELY? The Harlequin! Are killing clanless weretigers! That is the premise. But at some point, YOU FORGOT TO FUCKING EXPLAIN THE PREMISE. The Harlequin work for Marmee Noir, so I’m guessing this is her bag. Her goal, you know, overall, is to inhabit Blake’s body so she can, whatever, fucking rule the world with her magical vagina – I couldn’t/can’t ever actually justify, in my head, why the MOTHER OF ALL DARKNESS would give two fucks about Blake, despite how illogically amazing she is, like, who could POSSIBLY trump what is explained to me as The End All Be All of every scary fucking thing ever invented, but OK, you win, this is what happens, this omnipotent/omnipresent being is endlessly thwarted by a stupid bitch with guns and an effervescent hoohaa.
Anyway, her goal as mentioned is to take over Blake’s body. How, exactly, is sending The Harlequin out to kill clanless weretigers all crazy style like a logical conduit to that end? It’s a lure? Apparently? Is what you’re telling me? That is the dumbest fucking thing I have ever heard. I reiterate: mother of all darkness! Should not need a VERY half-baked plan with absolutely no relevance to her goal to lure Anita Blake to fucking Tacoma, Washington (and WHY THE FUCK Washington?!) and UM WHOOPS it doesn’t work anyway, because of course it doesn’t work, because of course Blake wins every time, but usually you have the decency to at least give me a believable reason why whatever fight is happening is actually happening and not just 200 pages of “I AM ANITA AND I AM AMAZING AND COPS ARE ASSHOLES AND I AM AMAZING AND SEX WITH ME IS GREAT AND I AM AMAZING AND SOMETIMES PEOPLE HATE ME AND I DON’T CARE AS LONG AS THEY ARE STILL TALKING ABOUT ME”
So I guess congratulations are in order, because you have managed to keep me sufficiently full of blinding rage for an entire 20 books. Perhaps it is YOUR vagina that is magical (I’m assuming you write your books with your vagina.) Under other circumstances, I would also consider thanking you for giving me a book that is entirely free of Richard, but if given the choice between 200 pages of his existential angst and 200 pages of THE WORST DIALOGUE EVER* with angry misogynist cops (because there are no other kinds), I think I almost prefer Richard. I mean, the devil you know, right?
Can’t wait for the next installment. Honestly. I can’t wait to round up every copy in publication and throw them off a fucking bridge. No. No. Set fire to them, THEN throw them off a fucking bridge. I think it might now be my personal crusade to destroy all evidence that your terrible books every existed. And by crusade, I mean I’m not actually going to do anything because I’m pretty lazy, but I will fantasize the fuck out of a world that is free of Anita fucking Blake.
*No seriously, your dialogue sucks. It is physically painful to me to even skim through the 10 page conversations about nothing that always take place in parking lots. You’ve been doing this for a while. It’s time to take a course or get some kind of professional help in this area. There are books on the subject. Like, lots of them.
I quit reading Anita Blake quite a few years ago when I too realized that all they are is a little adventure plot with a LOT of sex stuck in. It seemed that after the first two the sex increased from one stuck in the middle to three or four or more per story. Not needed. The Vampire Hunter/Animator was really cool, but the smut was not.
ReplyDeleteThis is great. It's like you read my fucking mind. I can't tell you how rage-inducing the words "ma petite" are to me. I can't spend enough time yelling at the top of my lungs about how Richard is obviously a self-loathing queer and that if he just embraced his homosexuality he MIGHT BE AN INTERESTING CHARACTER! (I mean he french braids his hair and loves show tunes for fucks sake. Who does he think he's fooling?) I will say one positive thing: Somewhere around the 7th or 8th book LKH stopped going into detail about Anita's shitty, tacky clothes and how her "nikes with blue shwoosh to match completed the outfit" HATE.
ReplyDeleteWord! The fucking blue swish! UGH SO MUCH HATE.
DeleteThere are apparently MORE books now. I refuse to read them. My sanity, she is a frail thing anymore.
That goddamn color co-ordinated blue swish, I'm glad I'm not the only person alive who cough*hates*cough that choice of wardrobe. I've re-started the books (God help me) out of a sense of nostalgia and I always imagine all the characters in a limboish, lo-fi soft core film from the 80s. It helps with the dated concepts and lack of plotline in places. But despite my best efforts I've been finding it very painful to suspend my belief towards the blatant misogny, casual racism and eurocentric, upper middle class approach this series exhibits with a rabid "ardeur". I can take the sexy times with a pinch of salt, but the slow, painful deterioration of a good character is really grating on me, which is why I sought to Google echo chambers that respond my feeling. Glad to know I'm not alone. I really enjoyed reading this review, it helped me cope with the deeply annoying prospect of a lot of bad writing ahead of me.
DeleteI've read a range of paranormal romance novels when I was younger and I don't remember being as singularly annoyed by any heroine as much as Anita Blake specially because she held a special place in my heart when I was younger and had not read too far into the series.
I think the Dark Hunter books by Sherrylin Kenyon weren't are worth a read, though corny as hell, as well as the novels by Christine Feehan. There was a rather smut filled but sex-positve series I had read a long time ago within the genre whose name I cannot seem to place at the moment with well developed female characters who were sisterhood of badassery unlike in the Anita Blake world where the fellow gender is treated as callously as ignorant,heteropatriachy will allow. I'm a reader first and feminist second, but even so, this series gets quite hard to swallow progressively. *rant over*