kippurbird | And so it begins.

Anita Blake Danse Macabre by Laura K Hamilton.

Chapters 1

We begin promisingly enough. The story is told in Anita's POV, first person. The second sentence is "I was supposed to be out jogging but instead I was sitting at my breakfast table talking about men, sex, werewolves, vampires, and that thing that most unmarried but sexually active women fear most of all - a missed period." Here we learn what sort of world Annita lives in, and the fact that she finds a missing period more frightening than werewolves let's us know that it's practically normal to know about these sort of things. A good start. This is a sort of thing that a typical woman would worry about and confide in with her best friend. In this case Ronnie.

Ronnie tries to reassure her and say that it might have been from stress, while Anita lets us know that she's a vampire executioner and her cases have gotten slowly and slowly more worse over the years. And that she couldn't discuss the executioner stuff with Ronnie but she can do the potential pregnancy with her. Just what every girl needs someone to talk about their feminine problems with. No problems there.

Also it turns out that Ronnie turned up because she needed to talk to Anita about her boyfriend. She's going to be moving in with him and she's having doubts. Apparently her last relationship ended badly. Really badly, so of course she's worried. They do some girl talk, and it turns out Ronnie's boyfriend is a were-rat. This is apparently a pretty normal things, but they're not accepted very well in society.

Anita gives her a pep talk and then we get our first Sue Trait.

I leaned my hands against the sink, and looked at her through a curtain of my long dark hair. It had gotten too long for my tastes, but Micha had made me a deal: If I cut my hair, he'd cut his, because he preferred his hair shorter, too. So my hair was fast approaching my waist for the first time since junior high.

First off long hair to the waist/butt is a typical Sue trait. It's utterly impractical, especially since she's in a busy active kind of job that's not very safe thing to have. Also that deal made no sense. If she doesn't like her hair long and he doesn't like his hair long, why is both their hair long? It's like there's something missing there that Hamilton knows but forgot to tell her readers because she knows it so why put it in the text? This is something a lot of writers have problems with. Especially beginning ones because they forget what they know and what the reader sees on the page. But in truth many writers have this difficulty, which is why they need other people to go over their work and point out these gaps in information.

After this lovely bit we get into a discussion on Pro Choice Vs Pro Life. Ronnie suggests that Anita abort the baby and then she wouldn't have to deal with it and the problems it would cause with Anita's busy sex life. Anita doesn't want to. Ronnie doesn't understand why.

"It's your body," [Ronnie] said.

"Yeah and I took my chances by having sex with this many men on a regular basis."

"You're on the pill," she said.

"Yeah, and if I'd wanted to be a hundred percent safe I'd have still used a condom, but I didn't."

Apparently Anita wants to get STDs because she doesn't want to be a hundred percent safe. Now that's a heroine I can believe in!

Moving on. Ms. Hamilton uses the phrase "Yeah and" twice in a row which makes the conversation feel stilted and cumbersome.

Anita believes that abortion is taking a life, but that the person has a right to chose what to do with their bodies. Somehow I feel that's Hamilton talking there and not Anita. And it's still kind of weird when Anita says, "but I also believe it's a life, especially once it's big enough to live outside the womb." From what I know and have been able to look up, if it's big enough to live outside the womb you can't get it aborted. Ronnie answers this with, "Once a Catholic always a Catholic."

The thing is, if Anita was still a Catholic (which she's not because apparently the Pope excommunicated everyone who could raise the dead) she'd likely not be having sex with five guys on a regular basis and living with two of them. This, my dear pigeons, is called bad characterization. Anita feels like she's a Catholic even if she's been kicked out and yet she indulges in a life style that isn't no where remotely Catholic. If she Hamilton truly wanted her being Catholic to matter then she would at least have qualms about her lifestyle and make it feel like she hasn't a choice, but she likes her lifestyle.

Speaking of her lifestyle we get an in depth look at all the people she's fucking. Yes, fucking, because it really doesn't seem to involve any love what soever. Jean-Claude Master of the City who is a potential daddy... but he's dead. Apparently that doesn't stop him from being fertile for a while. At least Buffy had a better sense of it. I mean, logically, without blood you couldn't get an erection, but I'm sure the demon part of the Buffy Vampire might have something to do with it, and they did acknowledge that vampires couldn't get pregnant because they're dead. The fact that Hamilton's vampires could still theoretically make babies is a pretty far stretch for me. Asher and Damian are also vampires. Then there's Micah, who is fixed, and Nathaniel who is a twenty year old stripper. Anita lives with two men. One of whom is a twenty year old stripper.

Someone is REALLY living out their sex life fantasies here.

Nathaniel used to be Anita's pomme de sang which is apple of blood, which means absolutely nothing to me. Hamilton tries to explain it through dialog but fails miserably. HOWEVER we learn that Anita has to feed off sex. It's says that. Right in the text.

If you were a vampire you'd be taking blood from your little stripper, but thanks to that blood sucking son of a bitch you have to feed off of sex. SEX for God's sake! First that bastard made you his blood whore now you're just a-"

Apparently this makes Ronnie a horrible person because she's worried that her friend is going down a path and losing all self respect for her self and becoming some sort of monster. And yes maybe this is something Anita might not want to hear, but it should be something so that she realizes what she's doing to herself.

It doesn't come off like that at all. Instead Ronnie is a horrible person for calling Anita a whore and she immediately backpedals about having said it. And it's Ronnie's fault because Anita gets to sleep with all these hot men and she doesn't so obviously she's jealous. No, she's not worried about her friend, she's suffering from penis envy!

It says that.

Because you know, everyone really wants to have Anita's sex life. With the STDs.

Then the two men, Micah and Nathaniel show up. Micah gets an ENTIRE paragraph of description, which I shall reproduce for you now.

Micah was in front, looking back of hes shoulder, still laughing, talking. He was my height, short, slender and muscular in that swimmer sort of way. He had to have his suits tailored because he needed an extra small athletic cut. You didn't get that off the rack. He'd come to me tanned, and stayed that way from jogging outside, mostly shirtless, all summer and autumn. He'd added a T-shirt to the short-shorts today. His hair was that deep rick brown that some poeple get after starting life as very blonde. His dark hair was tied back in a low ponytail that couldn't hide how curly it was, almost as curly as mine. He'd taken off his sunglasses so when I moved into his arms, I could look up into his chartreuse eyes. Yellow green leopard eyes in his delicate face. A very bad man had once forced him to stay in leopard for until, when he came back to human, he couldn't come all the way back.

Ronnie got about three lines of description scattered through out the chapter. Micah here gets an entire bloody paragraph. Can you say Stu? I knew you could.

Anita then smacks one on Micah and of course, Ronnie who is suffering from Penis Envy, gets upset about this. Never mind the fact that it's a very big soul sucking kiss and Ronnie is having issues about it. That's something to do in front of your best friend.

Nathaniel then reappears. I say reappear because he was there with Micah and then vanishes for a moment and then is all of a sudden there again.

He tore the tie from his ponytail and let his ankle length auburn hair fall around his nearly naked body. The jogging short shorts just didn't cover that much.

I had time to say "Nathaniel" and then he was in front of me.That other worldly energy that all lycanthropes could give off shivered off his skin and along my body. He was five six just tall enough for me to have to luook up to meet his eyes. His anger had turned them from lavender to the deeper color of lilacs, if lowers could burn with force of personality.

Ladies and gentlemen duck and cover! This is not a drill! We have Lavender eyes! This is not a drill!

She has a paragraph right after that about how she needs sex for every sort of emotional need. And that she MAYbe addicted to it. I couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic or not.

Finally we get this last bit of Mary Sue-ness from Anita. "I was the first human servant to gain the vampire ability to call an animal". This is one of the first of many special abilities that Anita will have that normal people won't.

The chapter ends when Ronnie spills about the baby.

Also, did anyone else notice that Hamilton likes putting the men in short shorts besides me? I got this image of the men in the seventies wearing those horrid short shorts and bouncing around. Not at all sexy.