The Killing Dance Review: When Anita Blake Stops Standing Outside the Monsters

The Killing Dance, the sixth Anita Blake novel, has plenty of plot. What it lacks is a single case capable of organising everything else around it. Someone has put half a million dollars on Anita's head; Richard's struggle with Marcus is reaching its conclusion; Jean-Claude is becoming increasingly difficult to keep at romantic distance; and Anita's own supernatural abilities are starting to behave in ways nobody quite understands.

After Bloody Bones pulled the procedural engine back into the foreground, The Killing Dance lets all the competing elements of the series crowd the stage at once. The assassination mystery is good, and once the person behind it becomes clear, the motive and earlier pieces fit together satisfyingly. It simply never controls the novel in the way the investigation did in its predecessor. This time Anita is less the detective than the case to be solved.

That makes The Killing Dance messier than Bloody Bones, but also more consequential. Anita has spent five books insisting that she deals with monsters without belonging among them. Here that distinction starts becoming difficult to defend at exactly the moment when the series itself becomes less willing to choose between detective fiction, horror, supernatural politics and romance.

This review discusses the novel's premise, recurring character dynamics and broad supernatural developments, but avoids the solution to the assassination mystery and the details of the climax.

Cover image: The Killing Dance by Laurell K. Hamilton, original Ace paperback edition. Used here for purposes of review and commentary.

Crossing the Line

Anita's division of the world into humans and monsters has always been slightly dubious. She raises the dead for a living, executes vampires under legal authority, spends much of her time around shape-shifters and vampires, and has already demonstrated abilities well outside anything that can reasonably be called normal. Psychologically, though, the boundary matters enormously to her: there are humans, there are monsters, Anita deals with monsters, and she does not belong with them.

The Killing Dance starts taking that position away from her. One of the quieter signs is her changing relationship with Dolph and the police. Dating Jean-Claude, the Master Vampire of St. Louis, is no longer merely an unconventional romantic decision. From the perspective of officers who have relied on Anita as their supernatural expert, she is becoming personally entangled with the same power structure she is supposed to help them understand.

They are not entirely wrong. Anita can no longer plausibly present herself as a neutral human observer who happens to know a great deal about vampires and werewolves. She has friends among them, romantic attachments among them, obligations to them and increasingly strong reasons to protect them. Her loyalties are changing before she has quite worked out what that means.

The shift is not simply that Anita discovers monsters can be nice. Hamilton has never made things that tidy. Some of the supernatural creatures around Anita are loyal, brave and capable of affection; others are sadists and predators. The humans are hardly morally uniform either. What begins to fail is the assumption that being human and being morally right amount to roughly the same thing.

There is danger in that development as well as liberation. Anita may be becoming less simplistic about the supernatural world, but she is also becoming embedded in a society where violence, domination and supernatural obligation are political facts rather than exceptional events. Losing the old human-versus-monster distinction does not automatically make her wiser. It removes an inadequate moral framework without immediately supplying a better one.

Richard, Jean-Claude and What Anita Is Actually Choosing

Richard makes some progress in The Killing Dance, which at least makes him somewhat less exasperating than usual. His problem has never simply been that he dislikes being a werewolf. He wants to protect the pack and exercise the responsibilities of leadership while recoiling from the violence on which its hierarchy rests. He wants Anita to accept him while remaining unwilling to accept himself.

There is something genuinely tragic in that conflict, but stretched across several books it has also become frustrating. Richard's refusal to participate does not cause the ugly parts of werewolf society to disappear. Marcus remains in power. Raina remains Raina. Other people live with the consequences while Richard tries to preserve a moral distance from the system in which he is already deeply involved.

The Killing Dance finally pushes that philosophy against material reality. At some point leadership becomes less about what you believe and more about what you are prepared to do. The confrontation with Marcus works because it is not merely another supernatural fight. It forces Richard's attempt to separate moral identity from physical nature and political responsibility to meet a situation in which refusing to choose is itself a choice.

That also clarifies why Jean-Claude has been gaining ground with Anita for several books. Richard and Jean-Claude offer her two very different responses to monstrosity. Richard still hopes supernatural power can be reconciled with an essentially unchanged idea of human goodness. Jean-Claude has long since stopped expecting those categories to fit cleanly together. He is manipulative, ruthless and entirely too comfortable treating relationships as extensions of supernatural politics, but he rarely pretends otherwise.

Richard wants Anita to believe he can remain the person he thinks he ought to be. Jean-Claude mostly asks Anita to accept the person he already is, and increasingly he extends the same permission to her. That makes their changing relationship more interesting than a simple question of which supernatural man Anita finds more attractive.

Anita has had the hots for Jean-Claude for a very long time, despite spending an impressive number of pages insisting that nothing is going to happen. In The Killing Dance, the emotional balance begins to change because Anita herself is changing. She is becoming more powerful, more entangled in supernatural society and less able to imagine herself standing entirely outside the world Jean-Claude inhabits. Richard offers the hope that supernatural power can be absorbed without fundamentally revising her picture of herself. Jean-Claude offers something darker but increasingly more plausible: perhaps the old picture was wrong.

The Triumvirate Turns the Power Dial

The most obvious piece of machinery being assembled for the later series is the triumvirate linking Anita, Jean-Claude and Richard. On a first read, it is another escalation in Hamilton's supernatural mythology. On a reread, it looks more like a structural turning point.

The early books operate with relatively comprehensible boundaries. Vampires have particular abilities. Werewolves have particular abilities. Anita is a necromancer who raises zombies and occasionally discovers that her talents reach further than expected. The triumvirate begins making those categories porous. Powers interact, reinforce one another and produce effects none of the participants entirely understands.

This gives us one of the best sequences in the novel, when experimenting with those connections results in Anita accidentally raising considerably more than she intended. It is funny, grotesque and alarming at the same time, a combination Hamilton handles unusually well. It also marks a different kind of power escalation. Anita is no longer merely discovering another application of an established ability; she is entering a system in which relationships themselves can become sources of supernatural power.

The Marcus confrontation belongs to the same general escalation, as does the growing importance of Jean-Claude's political position. Even the first pieces of Asher's history begin appearing here before he properly enters the series. I had completely forgotten that on this reread. Characters and relationships that later become central can acquire such weight in memory that they seem to have been present all along, and returning to the early books reveals how deliberately Hamilton starts laying track for them.

The dials are moving in the same direction: more power, more supernatural politics, more complicated bonds and higher body counts. The series has not yet reached the extravagance of some later volumes, but the mechanisms that will take it there are increasingly visible.

Horror, Sex and the Body

For all the increasing romance, Hamilton has not forgotten that monsters should sometimes be physically disgusting. Sabin, a master vampire whose body is literally rotting, restores some of the body-horror quality that sits beneath the glamour of Jean-Claude's world. Elsewhere there is shape-shifter pornography and the persistent reminder that lycanthropy is not merely an excuse for attractive people to become unusually athletic. Bodies in these books remain messy things: they rot, transform, bleed, tear and become objects of appetite.

That becomes particularly effective because the supernatural is growing more erotic at exactly the same time. The vampires may be beautiful, but they are still corpses. The werewolves may be sexually attractive, but their social order remains capable of savage physical violence. Hamilton keeps placing seduction and revulsion next to each other rather than allowing one to sanitise the other. The supernatural is seductive precisely while remaining revolting.

The series' long flirtation with sex also starts looking considerably less theoretical here. Until now there has been an extraordinary amount of thinking about sex relative to the amount actually taking place. That restraint is clearly reaching its limits. Romantic and erotic material is becoming less separable from the supernatural machinery around it: attraction, loyalty, power and politics increasingly occupy the same space.

Edward, meanwhile, remains refreshingly resistant to all this metaphysical complication. Anita has professional killers hunting her, so Edward brings Harley as backup, which has the unusual effect of making Edward look like the reassuring member of the team. Ancient vampires, necromantic bonds and werewolf hierarchies may be getting more complicated, but Edward can still reduce a surprising number of immediate problems to whether something can be shot.

A Series That Refuses to Choose

Rereading the Anita Blake novels has made me realise that my memory of their genre transformation was far too neat. I remembered a supernatural detective series that gradually turned into paranormal romance. Reading the books in order reveals something much less orderly.

Hamilton does not replace one genre with another so much as allow them to compete for space. Police procedural, hard-boiled detective fiction, horror, vampire politics, shape-shifter social structures and romance keep interrupting one another. Anita can spend one chapter worrying about her relationships and the next discussing ammunition or standing over a body. A grotesque supernatural encounter can be followed by sexual tension, which can then be interrupted by Edward arriving with another alarming associate.

In my broader urban fantasy reread, that instability has become one of the genre's most interesting features. These elements fit together, but never perfectly. Horror needs the monster to remain disturbing. Romance needs intimacy with the monster to become imaginable. Detective fiction wants mysteries with rules and solutions. Supernatural politics keeps widening the world beyond the individual case. Anita Blake tries to sustain all of them at once.

That helps explain why the series can provoke such incompatible reactions from readers. Someone primarily interested in the investigations may wonder why increasingly large stretches are devoted to Anita's romantic life. A reader invested in the relationships may be less enthusiastic about firearms, crime scenes and decomposing bodies. Horror and romance pull especially hard in opposite directions: one depends on preserving otherness, while the other needs enough common ground to make intimacy possible.

The obvious solution would be to choose, but Hamilton mostly refuses. Sometimes that produces a mess. It also helps explain why the series became so distinctive. The later explosion of urban fantasy and paranormal romance would make many of these combinations more familiar, but the early Anita Blake novels still feel odd because their component genres have not settled into a comfortable formula. The friction remains visible.

The Killing Dance is pivotal because that friction stops being secondary to the case. Bloody Bones demonstrated that nearly everything associated with the later series was already present; the difference was largely one of proportion. Here those proportions move far enough to change the shape of the novel itself. The investigation no longer automatically gets first claim on the story. Romance, supernatural politics and Anita's expanding power can compete with it on equal terms.

The same thing is happening to Anita. For five books she has repeatedly tried to work out how close she can get to the monsters without becoming one of them. The Killing Dance begins to expose the weakness in the question. Anita is no longer standing safely on the human side deciding which monsters deserve killing. She is bound to them, attracted to them, politically entangled with them and increasingly powerful in ways the ordinary humans around her cannot share.

The more interesting question is no longer whether Anita has become one of the monsters. It is whether “monster” is still a useful category for deciding whose side she should be on.