Sunday, Aug. 27, 2006

A Book Review -- _Danse Macabre_








Which Anita Blake Character Is Your Ideal Mate?


Jean-Claude
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For the record, that picture above looks very little like the Jean Claude of the series. In fact, I believe that's Johnny Depp with wet hair... which, not that JD isn't a handsome man, because he is, but Jean Claude smokes Depp without even trying, thank you, goodbye, drive through.

At any rate, I thought this little quiz result would be a good opener to a book review I promised a few entries back, for Laurell K. Hamilton's Danse Macabre. If you're not a fan of the series, or have never read her stuff and have no interest in reading what I think about this book, or if talk of paranormal romance mysteries or vampire fiction leaves you cold, then you might want take your leave. Also, if you plan to read this book and are spoiler-phobic, you might want to come back some other time. Yes? Okay?

Now.

Let me give you a little background about how I came to read these books of Ms. Hamilton's. It was a little over four years ago when I picked up the first book in the Anita Blake series, Guilty Pleasures at a used book store. I was riding the crest of my "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" craze, and was starting to devour any book that hinted at romance/mystery blended with the paranormal. Guilty Pleasures did this, and I think the book cost me a whole two dollars.

I read it, and was intrigued by the shape of Anita's world. According to the "Anitaverse", vampires were not only real but had just received, by law, some of the rights that humans had, and were not exactly embraced by all, but folks were working on acceptance of the undead as simply another race to be eventually integrated into society. Also real in this world are zombies, and Anita herself is a zombie raiser by profession. Why raise a zombie, you ask? Sometimes, it's to settle a legal dispute, or to help solve a murder. What better way to find out who killed someone than to bring the victim back to life temporarily and ask them? Zombie raisers are, as you might imagine, very rare, with very odd gifts. But there's a market for it, just like anything else, and so Anita is able to make a living by harnessing a talent that wouldn't have an outlet otherwise.

Anita has a couple other jobs, too. Busy woman, I know. She's a vampire executioner, meaning that she's legally licensed to kill rogue vampires. In the old days, before vampires were "legal", people just killed them as needed. But now that the undead were considered citizens, there had to be laws created around taking them out. And, she's also a special paranormal consultant for the supernatural crimes unit within the police department. (Later in the series, she picks up Federal Marshall status for her paranormal work.)

So, Guilty Pleasures focuses on setting up Anita in these three roles, while introducing other characters like Jean Claude, powerful vampire and entreprenuer who also happens to have the hots for Anita. Anita herself is a tough-as-nails assassin/necromancer, but with a soft side she keeps well hidden. Her life is very chaotic and very dark, but she feels she has it all under control. By the end of the first book, this illusion of control has begun to crumble. She faces, and eventually takes down in a bloody, nasty battle, the 1000-year-old Master Vampire of St. Louis (this city is the setting for almost all the books). Jean Claude moves onto that throne as the next powerful, and refuses to let Anita retreat from the new door onto the underworld that she has opened.

And so it begins. The writing of the first few books is (please forgive me, Laurell, if your eyes ever find this entry) not the best I've ever seen. She repeats phrases and descriptions, verbatim, from one book to the next and even within the same book. For instance, I didn't count exactly how many times she referred to Jean Claude's eyelashes as "black lace" in the first three books, but I can tell you that it was a freaking lot. It's a pretty image, but after the first 28 times, I get it, okay?

And the formula for the books was simple but moved at a comfortable pace -- we had a mystery plot, some kind of murder thing, we had some vampiric interaction, usually in the form of Jean Claude or his undead employees (JC owns a good half a dozen nightclubs, bars and other related businesses in St. Louis's "Blood Quarter"), and we had some kind of zombie raising. By the end of the book, we had caught the killer, solved the mystery, and had some cool character development along the way. It was for this part of the equation that I was willing to overlook some of the writing issues -- the mysteries, while bloody and gross, were interesting to the forensic scientist in me, and Anita's own growth and further embroilment with the paranormal factions in her life (wereanimals show up, in increasing intervals, in addition to the vampires)were fascinating and left me wondering what was going to happen next. I devoured the first nine books easily, with great curiosity and excitement.

Book nine is Obsidian Butterfly, and is a bit of a departure from the first eight books, but in a good way, in my opinion. Anita's life has gotten crazier and crazier, and includes a deep involvement with Jean Claude, vampire politics, a werewolf leader named Richard, all of his were politics, and the blossoming of her own necromantic talents. To get a break, she leaves St. Louis for Santa Fe, to help out her friend, Edward, one of the few humans left in her life. So, essentially, we spend a whole book away from the main plots, and instead focus on a couple of straight mystery plots. There's some vampire stuff, of course, but it's secondary. I loved Obsidian Butterfly.

However, it's after this book that everything starts to get really weird. And really divergent from the original books, as far as plot, feel, and content. Book ten, Narcissus in Chains, sees the introduction of The Ardeur, also known as The Plot Device That Ate Europe, And Also Anita's Dignity. The mystery plots start to evaporate. Hamilton gives a few token stabs at including them for a book or two, but it becomes quickly apparent that she's not interested in them in the slightest anymore. To be blunt, books ten through fourteen are essentially hundreds-of-pages-long sex scenes, broken up by short bursts of vampire politics or wereanimal drama. I read them really fast now, even though the books get bigger and bigger, and that's mostly because I'm skimming, searching for something of substance.

So, that finally brings me to Danse Macabre, book fourteen. This book... goes positively nowhere. As I hinted in my previous entry, I plowed through the book, as I tend to do, hoping for a return to the Anita of old. Not so much. In fact, this poor book was positively Seinfeldian in its pages and pages and pages of nothing really.

The premise of the book, and the reason for the title, is that a vampiric ballet company is coming to St. Louis and Jean Claude, as Master of the City, must play host. Just from that alone, there was so much promise for character development and plot continuation from earlier books, I was *hoping*. But, holy cow did this book go nowhere fast. The first two-thirds of the book covered about a day's worth of time, where a bunch of stuff happened that... well, honestly, I don't know exactly what happened. It was all very confusing and random and I know that Hamilton was trying to explain some things, but she jumped around so much and, I think, was distracted by all of the stuff going on, that she ended up partially explaining about a dozen things but to the satisfaction of no one.

In my not-so-humble opinion, Hamilton's big problem is that she has too many characters in each book. She made a game attempt to pare things down in Incubus Dreams by trying to focus on only certain characters. It sort of worked. But she didn't even attempt it here, and the shallow, scattershot approach showed. The characters that got the most page-time in Danse ended up saying the same things over and over, for the result of very little forward development, and Anita herself was running in place, so to speak. I miss the quips, the one-liners, the attitude. This is the woman who once said things like, "Women's dress clothes are the ultimate challenge to concealed-weapons carry." and "Anyone who says size doesn't matter has been seeing too many small knives." Now, she's so busy trying to sort out her love life and the incredible amount of drama that results from it that she has absolutely no time for anything else.

What makes me the most sad and frustrated with the series, probably, is that Hamilton keeps tossing in bits of other plots -- the whole Mother of All Darkness plot, for example -- plots that could be awesome if they were developed properly, but then they just hang there, all partially formed in their unrealized potential. It makes me nuts, to know that these books could have gone in a completely different direction, to a place reminiscent of the older books, but for whatever reason, Hamilton doesn't go there.

At any rate, this is only my opinion. Maybe Laurell has reasons for all of this, and in future books, all will be revealed in such a way that will make six books' worth of bad romantic drama worth it. Let me say, I'm extremely skeptical of this idea, but I won't rule it out, mostly because I'm a sucker and I love some of these characters a lot. The next book in the series, The Harlequin should be out late next year, and I'll buy it when it comes out because I want this all to work. I want the characters to develop, and I really want Anita to bitchslap someone. Anyone, really, at this point. And, according to what I've read about the new book, some of the characters from Obsidian Butterfly are coming back, including Edward, everyone's favorite, perfectly human, psychopath. So, whether I want to be or not, I'm already excited.

And I still love Jean Claude. He's dreamy. Hee!

saturncat at 9:42 p.m.

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