I decided to give the Anita Blake books one more chance and see if maybe Laurell K Hamilton could get back to supernatural crimes and mysteries.
A good deal of the opening pages of Affliction see Anita Blake telling any number of self righteous people that there’s nothing wrong with having sex with hundreds of random strangers and it’s none of their business anyway. In Anita Blake’s universe, just about any ‘normal’ person is now shown as a narrow minded bigot and often, a bible thumping narrow minded bigot.
You’re married and only have sex with one person? Bah! What a fuddy duddy! And that one person is only a human to boot? Anita can only feel sorry for you. You don’t like homosexuals? Vampires? Were-whatevers? You don’t like sharing your lovers with anyone and everyone? What a limited world view.
Meanwhile, there are killer zombies on the prowl. In between bouts of Anita taking pride in being pansexual, she does a bit of preternatural detective work.
And then there’s Edward, easily my favorite of the cast of thousands that make up the Anita Blake universe. Edward is a cold blooded killer who likes things like flame throwers and phosphorus grenades. Edward showing up is always a good sign that this will be a book about hunting monsters and not a book about Anita having sex with anything that moves. Oh, there’s still sex, but the three sex scenes are muted down to a supporting role and can be easily enough skipped over.
One of the challenges with the Anita Blake books is that there are so many people in the regular cast now. Think about the main recurring characters in a Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple book and you can easily count them off on one hand, in Affliction there seem to be dozens of vampires and were-animals that are part of Anita’s inner circle, then add to that Micah’s extended family, local law enforcement, other Preternatural Marshals, members of SWAT teams, doctors and nurses-all of which are given names and at least a passing attempt at giving them a bit of backstory. Affliction is easily the best Anita Blake book out of the last ten or so, but there were times I felt I needed a scorecard to keep track of who was a racist swine and who was helping Anita and Edward solve the case.
I’m guessing it’s easier for Laurell K Hamilton to focus on Anita and the many loves of her life than it is to think up new enemies for her to do battle with. After all, how many more multi-millennium old monsters that want to rule the world can there be out there?
Our main villain this time out controls a horde of killer zombies and Boulder, Colorado falls victim to a small scale zombie apocalypse. Our Big Bad Guy has plans to destroy the whole human world, but he has the bad luck of attracting Anita Blake’s attention and then Edward’s. I’ve always thought that Edward should have his own series of books, but Laurell doesn’t love Edward the way she loves Anita.
Mixed in with all the shooting and killing and blowing things up, is Anita Blake pondering such deep questions as why people hate women who have a hundred lovers, but not so much men who have a hundred lovers. For the most part I think people don’t really care much anymore, unless you happen to be the main character of a series of vampire hunting books that turn into soft porn books-then the readers tend to get a bit snippy about it. As in most of the last few books, there are a couple of religious fanatics/bigots/supernatural haters that are mean to Anita and her army of lovers, even as they are busying saving the world from being overrun by zombies. Anita continues to be baffled with these people and occasionally lets her anger get the better of her.
One of the major oddities for me in the Anita Blake books is that she occasionally runs into people who are atheists. Really? How does that work? In our universe we have no proof of the supernatural, but how do you go on not believing if you see vampires and werewolves and glowing crosses in the presence of evil? Once you see proof the world is not flat, how do you keeping believing that it is?
Affliction was a good read. Anita got to have sex, Edward got use his flame thrower, and just about everyone got at least a few minutes of screen time. I could have lived without all the Peyton Place drama about small town family life, but hey, you can’t have everything. This was as close to an old style Anita Blake book as I read in a long time. And that’s a good thing.
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