Share your Guilty Pleasures!
1. Grab the Guilty Pleasures button from up top, and post it to your blog (in Edit HTML view).
2. Share your guilty pleasure reads for the month with your readers - even the ones you enjoyed reading and knew you shouldn't! Come on, we all have them...
3. Add yourself to the Linky, and share the love!
4. Hop on to other Guilty Pleasure readers blogs and leave your comments.
5. A new Guilty Pleasures post will be added by e-Quills every month - follow for updates!
e-Quills Guilty Pleasures for December
Anita & Me:
A note on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels by Laurell K. Hamilton (posted by J. Hudson)
I first came across this series of saucy supernatural novels when I was in my teens, fresh off my Buffy fandom and ready for another dose of bloodlust. Laurell K. Hamilton hooked me on her world of the fearless, zombie-raising minx Anita who questions the newly animated dead by day, and hunts vampires by night. For the young, rambunctious me, it was the perfect mix of hardboiled prose, supernatural intrigue and tittilating Gothic seduction. The series is now twenty novels strong, and the character of Anita has evolved from a good Christian girl with a crucifix and a handgun to a headstrong leader with a harem of vampires and shapeshifters at her beck and call, not to mention a host of rather erotic powers. But how did this transformation take place?In the first instalment, the aptly titled Guilty Pleasures, Anita has her first foray into the vampire politics of St. Louis, becoming involved with vampire master Jean-Claude. The second novel, The Laughing Corpse, sees her embrace her necromancer powers to do battle with a voodoo queen, and the third, Circus of the Damned, forms a love triangle between Anita, Jean-Claude, and Richard, a clean-living werewolf trying to eke out a normal existence as a schoolteacher. At the very start of her adventures, Anita states "I don't date vampires, I kill them", but her love life soon becomes the axis around which all of her blood-spattered exploits revolve.
Over the next few years, and next several books, I would revisit Anita - in The Lunatic Cafe she investigated snuff porn, in Burnt Offerings a firestarter, and in Obsidian Butterfly she stepped away from the men in her life to solve a series of gruesome murders. There were fantastic plots that involved serial killers, witches, ancient vampire vendettas and the complex mating rituals of were-leopards. There are hunks and harlots aplenty. This fictional world is an addictive one - if somebody isn't trying to kill our heroine, they are trying to bed her. Sometimes these two options aren't mutually exclusive.
I gave up on Anita around about book eleven, Cerulean Sins, by which point her connection with the creatures of the night had resulted in her possessing a succubus-like power known as the ardeur - she could literally feed on the sexual energy of others. Sadly, this became a plot device that overtook the previously mystery-based format of the stories. Laurell K. Hamilton is soon releasing the twentieth instalment of Anita's adventures, and from what I hear on the fan-vine, it is more of the same - black lace erotica. I'm a huge fan of porn. But I can't help but feel somewhat disappointed that a series with such imagination and potential, certainly the predecessor of Charlaine Harris's True Blood novels, has become wet dream material for Goths.
Still, I might give Anita another go, just for old times' sake.
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