Several years back, I found an intriguing book on the shelves of some random chain bookstore in some random mall in some random town I happened to be visiting. It was called Obsidian Butterfly, and the cover looked fascinating. I missed my due diligence process and somehow managed to not realize this was several books into a series. Reading it through, I quickly discovered this must be a piece of a larger whole, but the story itself stood alone enough that I enjoyed myself. Indeed, I promptly looked up the author and got a full listing of the books in order, ordered them all from amazon.com (books sent to my door. I love technology), and eagerly awaited their arrival.
I ate up the Anita Blake books right up through Obsidian Butterfly again, this time enjoying it even more with my increased understanding. Little did I know at that point that I’d hit the last excellent book in the series with the first one I’d read.
The next book, Narcissus In Chains, is an transitional book. This is where the books truly metamorphosizes from a supernatural private dick series with some great sex into a supernatural sex series with some mediocre private dick stuff. The books got longer. The sex scenes got worse. The plot disappeared. I soldiered my way through The Harlequin in 2007, still stupid enough to buy them in hardcover, because I had SO loved the original Anita Blake, and I kept hoping that Hamilton would find a way to meld her two very disparate styles into one awesomesauce blend, and I could rest happy again.
She didn’t, and I gave up. To compound the problem, once I realized I was loving the Anita Blake series, I started in on her brand new Meredith Gentry series as well. The first one sucked me in, and I liked her new world and new characters. Unfortunately, these followed the same course as the Anita Blake ones: large, cumbersome, no plot development, no storyline movement, and lots and lots of repetitive sex. I gave up at A Lick of Frost.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good sex scene, and Hamiton writes a frickin' awesome sex scene usually. Heck, I love writing a good sex scene. The first problem with Hamilton is that she doesn’t know when to stop. The second problem with Hamilton is that she found an entirely new reader base that doesn’t want her to stop and is okay with the lesser quality of her works. The third problem with Hamilton is that she is so flippin’ insecure that she can’t take any criticism whatsoever. Have you ever read her website’s forums? There’s so much stroking and “taking care of Laurell” that it makes me ill. And if you have a negative opinion of one of her works, you are just not that intelligent apparently.
Despite already hitting a trifecta of “why not to read” points, Hamilton’s works pile on the reasons.
Her two series sometimes seem to blend, as if she forgot which one she was writing a (sex) scene for. This leaves the reader with zero character continuity. The fae of Genry shouldn’t be piled up in “puppy piles” like the lycanthropes of Blake. It just doesn’t fit what she told us.
Hamilton is also incredibly repetitive in her phraseology. So many of her sex scenes involve a spine bowing that by now, Saint Louis must not possess a healthy spine in its populace.
Several of her later books also take place within a very short time frame (like hours or maybe a day), but they were supposed to be leading up to something and you NEVER GET THERE. One of the Gentry books stopped every few paragraphs to go into lengthy sex scenes and some old fey getting new powers (or the return of their old ones) just by screwing Merry in a hallway or something. We never get to the ball in this book, and it seems completely ridiculous that we don’t.
On the sex bit: one thing she has not learned is that sex can and should be implied sometimes. You can have a paragraph-long bit that shows they just had sex instead of breaking out the six page, spine bowing, omg sex is so good thesaurus.
And Hamilton’s two main characters are not content to be awesome. They must be Everything. They are the Jesus Christs of the Erotic Fantasy World. These are Mary Sues of epic proportions. They are so Mary Sueish as to make most Mary Sues look downright blasé. This is Mary Sue on crack. Anita can’t just be the best damned animator and vampire killer ever with some smattering power and an interesting psychological profile to intrigue the men, human and otherwise. Nope. Not good enough for Hamilton’s little fantasy world. Her Mary Sue has to be everything to everyone and everyone must want to fuck her and once they do, they must love her. I’ve never seen more men willing to confuse a nice lay for a soul mate.
Hamilton’s antics lead one to ponder, “what the hell happened?!” and while I have theories, they are of a fairly personal nature to the author’s psyche, so I’ll stay away from meandering on about them, lest someone interpret them as a slam on her. I’m not. I don’t know her, so I have no opinions about her personally. However, Hamilton as an author has let down a decent-sized fanbase of avid, intelligent readers to produce mass marketed sex books, and she doesn’t have the courtesy to admit it.
Laurell K. Hamilton owes me nothing; this I know. She has made her decisions, they are her creative works, and she gets to do with them what she will. She is successful, and (I hope) happy. She seems like a good person in general, and she's a damned talented author. I still feel she betrayed her work for a buck at a point where she didn’t even need to, since they were selling well anyway. I wouldn't have cared if she had started a series with this new genre and purpose in mind, absolutely not!
So I am done with Laurell K. Hamilton and her Mary Sues and her “working out her life’s angsts via defensiveness and sex”. I miss the old Anita. I miss what Merry could have been. I miss the money I spent on hardcovers and hope.
Recommendation: Don’t bother with the Merry Gentry. Read Anita up to Obsidian Butterfly.
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