My younger brother got me into her books after he met her and dated her a few times, but like the others, it turned me off that the books turned into Anita’s soap opera about who to boink next, instead of focusing on her job. She also became way too angry and soul-shredding for me. :rolleyes:
I’d be happy if the weird sex stayed in the Merry Gentry books and Ms. Blake tried celibacy for a few books. Frankly, after all the author’s pretensions towards being “edgy” or whatever (you should check out her blog) I am very disappointed she wimped out of tentacle sex with Shloto or whatever his name is.
Those were written by Mercedes Lackey, not Laurel K. Hamilton.
My opinion is that Obsidian Butterfly was the last worthwhile Anita Blake novel written.
My recommendation to fans of the early Anita Blake (pre-pornfest) is that they try either Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files or Patricia Brigg’s Mercy Thompson series: Moon Called, Blood Bound, and Iron Kissed for developed alternate worlds with supernatural elements. For those not familiar with Mercy Thompson, she’s a sort of were-coyote who hangs out with werewolves that, while temperamental, are at least sane and not constantly into bad-porn bondage.
I’ve said it before - the problem with Anita Blake is that she started to write her own bad slash fanfic. (And I stopped three or four books in).
I loved the Anita Blake books right up through Obsidian Butterfly. Since then, they’ve gotten progressively shittier. I never even got around to reading Harlequin. For me, it wasn’t the lousy porn that got me, it was the endless talking (and talking and talking and *talking[/i) about Anita’s increasingly tedious & bizarre love life.
Another fan through Obsidian Butterfly. Almost no sex in that one, and I think her relationship with Edward is fascinating. I haven’t bothered to check the last few out of the library. I can’t remember the last time she raised a corpse as part of her regular job.
StG
I abandoned my first and only LKH read, a Meredith Gentry book, probably the first, after the scene in which she, quite literally, humped the seal. It was close enough to a shark for me…
ah yes, tentacles. that was a bit disappointing.
my suggestion for y’all… check out lilith saintcrow. aside from a very cool name, she writes very interesting books about a necromancer.
The local speculation (she’s from around these parts) is that she started believing her own publicity. She acquired a gaggle of goth-vamp-type-fans that followed her simply everywhere constantly telling her she was wonderful and could do no wrong. I’ve heard it described as Anne Rice Syndrome.
The general local opinion is the materials written during her first marriage are much better.
Excuse me while I bash my head into this rock for a while.
I dug Anita, at first. I dug her all the way up to the point where I wanted to go “Look. You can be the practical bitch you say you are, or you can keep being a whiny emo fucker about your so-called ‘upbringing’ and ‘morals’ and annoy me just as much as Richard does every time you think about sex and your home life. Pick one - but if you’re going to pick ‘emo,’ then stop talking about what a heartless and pragmatic person you are, because that shit’s wearing papyrus-thin.” (Yes, I talked to the books. I still do. So what? Maybe someday they will listen, just like someday the characters in the bad chick flicks and action movies will listen, and also the monkeys will fly gleefully out of my butt, flinging my rainbow-colored, strawberry-scented feces at all and sundry, and we shall have a moonlight coprophiliac revel the likes of which have never before been seen outside the latest Merry Gentry book.)
I still like Merry. Merry doesn’t have Anita’s hangups, and there have never been any pretenses that Merry is anything but a vehicle for porn. I’m okay with that. I dig magic porn, and the magic porn in Merry’s world is much better written than the magic porn in Anita’s. After all, only the men are emo in Merry’s world, and that apparently doesn’t hurt their performance one bit, because Merry has the All-Healing Vagina Of Magical Amazing Awesomeness. So I’m down with that, and although it’s not really hardcore fapfapfap-worthy, it’s still fun to read.
I knew that Anita and I were really growing apart when I read a 600-page book which covered two days and she had sex either 6 or 7 times, and the sex took up over 300 pages of the book. That’s porn, Laurell. If you want to write porn, fine, awesome, great. The world needs more porn. But STOP KILLING A GOOD PROTAGONIST WITH IT. Introduce Merry to some wolves and leeches, and have her fuck them till none of them can move. Or, hell, do Merry-as-a-vampire, and write porn with that. I’ll buy it and read it and give it good reviews, if you do it well! But Stop. Fucking. With. Anita.
Give. Me. Back. My. Shooter.
Cold, practical, intelligent female protagonists are incredibly hard to come by. They are rare creatures, and should be fed and nourished and encouraged at a high priority. You hear me, Laurell?
Give. Me. Back. My. Shooter.
Or, you know, I just don’t think we’ll be able to be friends anymore. I know, you won’t notice. You won’t care. It will not affect your life one iota. But it will affect mine, and the lives of girls and women like me - hungry for role models, for women we relate to, for women we can aspire to grow up to be. We’ll be poorer for not having Anitas in our pantheon, Laurell. You can write her, and make her real. You don’t have to take the sex out; just don’t make it lessen Anita. This is… disappointing.
So, yeah, maybe I was madder about Anita humping the shark than I thought. 
(Best thread title evar, by the way.)
sigh
I loved the early books when, like others have mentioned, it was more about her zombie work. I continue reading these books though, becase I have them all and I just HAVE to read them. It’s more of an OCD thing than anything.
I read the Merry Gentry books too and I have to say I thought the last one wasn’t bad.
Bravo!
Try Pamela Briggs Mercy Thompson books - there are only two of them to date (I think) and Brainiac4 assures me that Pamela Briggs STOPS writing characters when she discovers herself writing the same book over and over again.
(I have something I now call “Anita Blake Syndrome” where I will read only until I feel it start going South - for the “Undead and Unwed” books the first one was a very nice little romp - but I knew better than to touch the second one since I’d be ranting at it in a similar fashion.)
So far 3 Mercy Thompson books Moon Called, Blood Bound, and Iron Kissed. The next Mercy Thompson book, Bone Crossed, should come out early next year. There is a new series set in Mercyverce, starting with Cry Wolf. It comes out on July 29th. Can we tell I am a fan of Ms. Brigg’s work?
That’s actually why I love Obsidian Butterfly so much. Edward was by far my favorite character in the Anita Blake books. It could possibly be because I’m pretty sure he’s the only male in the series she didn’t try to dry-hump at some point, but it’s mostly because he’s so bloody awesome. So I was glad to have a book focus on basically nothing but her and Edward before the series went down the stupid chute.
Blood Noir only had two (and a half) sex scenes in it. I think. I’ve gotten to the point where I skip them, mostly, so there might have been one or two I missed. One with Jason & Nathaniel right at the beginning, and another with Jason mid-way through. The half is the one where Marmee had rolled everyone and no one was with it enough to remember what had happened.
Anita seems to be getting much more control over the ardor (finally!), and she also seems to be “growing up” in the sense that she’s not automatically pissing everyone off every time she opens her mouth. She even “solved” this one with her gun. Her powers may or may not have grown since Jason is now her wolf to call, but they didn’t come into play as the overwhelm everyone in the surrounding 5 counties way LKH seemed to be aiming at. I was pleased.
I mean, I understand how adrenaline can cause a human to do superhuman things, so I could sort of understand how it could make a supernatural ratchet up on the power levels, but it was all getting a bit deux ex machina for me.
I’m probably deluding myself, but it seemed to me that LKH is starting to move things away from the fapfest and back to the whole politics and mystery and inter-relatedness of it all. I hope so. Like A Priori Tea, I want the tough as nails, take no prisoners Anita back. Also her penguins, although I suppose a bed with 3 or 4 people in it means she doesn’t need to cuddle stuffed toys much anymore.
And Richard really needs to get over himself.
Another thing about Blood Noir …
Anita makes a big thing about her not working for the bodyguards or working for the bodyguard’s employer yet she allows the bodyguards to remain in the room even submitting to having to go into the bathroom to change clothes.
Patricia Briggs 
And she does, indeed, seem to stop writing characters when they seem to be getting all department of redundancy department. In fact, in marked contrast to a goodly many authors recently, she has some books that are not parts of series - they feature reasonably complete world building, good characterization, and an enjoyable plot that winds itself up after one single book. Even the series books don’t leave you with that “But then what happened?!?” cliffhanger crap. They’re all linked, but each individual plot point gets pretty well tidied off by the end of any given book. There are still overarching, environmental/political aspects of the world she’s built that aren’t fully resolved - but she doesn’t ever seem to do the thing where she ends at a spot where if (Og forbid) she dropped dead, the reader would be left forever hanging.
I was LOOKING at the book when I wrote Pamela - time for glasses.
I like Patricia Briggs, too.
Tanya Huff is also good. Her Blood series (starts with Blood Price) is about a 500-yr-old vampire named Henry Fitzroy living in Toronto. There’s no explicit sex but there is an interesting love triangle in these books. Tanya Huff also wraps up her series after about 3-5 books.
Just now this is jumping the shark? Since the beginning these things have been written by someone’s 15-year-old niece.