Hugin & Munin Journal

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. Ani...

Laurell K. Hamilton’s Bloody Bones , the fifth Anita Blake novel, feels almost like the series remembering what made its early procedural horror work. After The Lunatic Cafe allowed Anita’s romantic triangle to claim an increasingly large share of the narrative, the fifth book sends her out of St Louis for a professional animating job that develops into another brutal supernatural murder investigation. I found the return welcome. Anita once again has bodies to examine, witnesses to distrust, police officers to antagonise and supernatural explanations that become more complicated as the evidence accumulates. The mystery is less straightforward than I remembered, and enough of its central machinery had disappeared from my memory that substantial stretches felt almost new. Yet Bloody Bones does not actually take the series backwards. The relationship politics remain. Anita’s supernatural power continues to grow. The book contains more torture, bodily grotesquerie and sexualised mena...

Rereading Laurell K. Hamilton’s The Lunatic Cafe , the fourth Anita Blake novel, feels less like rediscovery than an audit of memory. The book still has the blood, bodies, police work and supernatural civic machinery that made early Anita Blake compelling. It is also where the series begins to tilt towards a romantic triangle that has not yet earned the narrative authority it starts to claim. That is one of the risks of returning to a long-running series. The question is no longer simply whether the book works, but what the reader responded to the first time: atmosphere, momentum, novelty, character voice, or a mixture that memory has since edited into a cleaner shape. My broader return to Anita Blake has repeatedly exposed that gap between the series I remember and the books themselves. The early novels were never delicate, but they had a hard, bloody competence. Anita raised the dead, investigated murders, hunted vampires and moved through supernatural danger with the clipped im...

I started reading Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series sometime in the late 1990s. My memory is vague about the exact year, but I clearly remember reaching Obsidian Butterfly in 2000, when it was only available in hardback. That was always the clearest sign that I had caught up with a series that was still very much alive. At the time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was one of the most exciting things on television, and I suspect it nudged me towards Guilty Pleasures . Anita was another young woman confronting vampires and monsters, although Hamilton’s world was darker, bloodier and considerably more adult. The term “urban fantasy” already existed, but the genre had not yet acquired the commercial visibility or familiar formula it would develop during the following decade. Hamilton did not invent supernatural detective fiction, but Anita Blake helped shape the particular mixture of crime, horror, romance and openly supernatural society that later became one of the genre’s dominant ...