Guilty Pleasures

I love Anita Blake, the feisty, insecure, kick-butt heroine of this story. She’s everything I want in a protagonist: Strong and clever enough to solve her own problems, naive enough to think that will always be the case, and a stranger to her own heart. Lots of room for growth. And grow, she does.

This book (and series) lean more toward the paranormal romance side of urban fantasy, but it also has a dark and gritty noir feel that walks the line of horror. This genre mash-up checked all the boxes for me, keeping me invested in the characters, the… show more.

My wife first turned me on to the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series, for which I am forever grateful.  Smart, passionate and endlessly resourceful, Anita is one of my favorite characters in modern fantasy fiction. 

I like to think of her as being, if not the spiritual sister to the protagonist of my own novel, at least her great-auntie. A necromancer working in St. Louis, Anita regularly deals with the resurrected dead and the undead, as part of both her professional and (increasingly complicated) personal life. 

The slam-bang pacing of this first book in the series makes it hard to… show more.

I love romances that are action-packed, and the story in Guilty Pleasures moves at Mach speed.

The heroine, Anita Blake, is a necromancer (someone who can re-animate the dead), but on occasion, she is also called upon to kill the undead. The duality of these roles, as you can imagine, drags her into all kinds of trouble.

Soon she runs afoul of master vampire, Jean-Claude—who she is also crazy-hot for. The power-brokering banter that goes on between these two formidable characters is some of the best. There’s never a dull moment. 

People have a love/hate relationship with the Anita Blake series, and if you don’t like a lot of sex in your books, then you should probably only read the first nine books (when Anita returns home after Obsidian Butterfly, you’re done).

The first books are so well written — plot, character, world building. However, a few books in the teens, I skip when re-reading because they are mostly sex without a plot. Later books, however, get back to plot and world building, and I enjoy them once again.

I don’t mind sex in my books, though, so your mileage may… show more.

While Elrod’s work was my first taste, Hamilton’s was a close follow-up. I started reading her Anita Blake Series not long after the Vampire Chronicles, and that gave birth to the idea of legalization for things preternatural. I like to think I took it in a different direction and made it my own, but I fully credit where my inspiration has come from. In later books, I have had some issues with Anita’s personality, but early on? She was so bad-@$$ to teenaged me and encouraged my passion for take-no-crap female leads.

One of the things I like about the Anita Blake series is that the stories are contemporary and vampires are now legal citizens... some of them even own nightclubs.

The books are set in St. Louis, where Anita’s primary job is as an animator... not the kind who draws cartoons... the kind who raises corpses as zombies. Her secondary job is as the official slayer, but unlike Buffy she gets paid for it.

In this first novel, the Master of the City needs her help, and calls a truce—for the time being. The Master’s second—charismatic vampire, Jean Claude, appears to… show more.

Before I read this book, I’d never heard of a necromancer, or someone who could raise the dead. In this alternate reality, Anita Blake is a necromancer who lives in St. Louis and raises the dead mostly to finish unsettled business. What a fascinating idea! Imagine if you could ask your grandmother what happened to a lost family heirloom, or settle a legal dispute that would otherwise go unsolved? 

As you can imagine, someone who can control the dead would not be beloved by the undead, and there are plenty of vampires in this world, as well as werewolves, shifters,… show more.

In my mind, Hamilton is the queen of Urban Fantasy. She wrote dark, gritty heroines who didn’t apologize for being sexually active—and she did it before it was cool. Anita Blake is like a more mature version of Buffy. Everyone should read that series at least once. 

Unlike many authors I know, my reading picked up when I was a teenager. I grew up in Ukraine, in a town where the library wasn’t close to us. My mother couldn’t afford to buy books for my sister and me as gifts because the country struggled greatly after the fall of the Soviet Union. Most of our school books were free. They were hand-me-downs from previous students. I still remember having to mend a lot of the pages and spines to be able to use most of my books. When I moved to Ireland to join my parents after… show more.