Guilty Pleasures
4 October 2011 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeThe other day I came across a copy of Laurell K Hamilton's first book, and picked it up idly. I'd given up on the Anita Blake books years ago; flicking through this one I suddenly found myself hooked all over again -- and furious.
It was "The Laughing Corpse" that originally hooked me, the sequel to this one, casually encountered on the library shelves one afternoon, and I didn't actually get to read "Guilty Pleasures" for some years, although I worked through most of the sequels as I tracked them down in various libraries. So it wasn't nostalgia that got my goat.
It was sheer frustration at the waste of it all: a great premise, an intriguing set of characters (poor Philip gets such short shrift in the later books that I didn't even remember his existence: those valedictory grave-visits can't have lasted long, I'm afraid), and a stonking hard-boiled film noir style ("Willie McCoy had been a jerk before he died. His being dead didn't change that..." -- an attention-grabbing opening line that wouldn't have put Dashiell Hammett to shame). The author really had something here -- why, oh why, did she end up throwing it all away in what was to become such utterly self-indulgent (and badly written) trash?
Interestingly, there is no romance in this first book. I think it's probably true that it was the Unresolved Sexual Tension between Anita Blake and her rival suitors that gives force to most of the series (and alas, runs absolutely true to form in that once it is actually resolved in both cases, this force loses almost all its effect -- it's no coincidence that the only successful book after this is "Obsidian Butterfly", in which Anita returns to her original abstinence), but in fact "Guilty Pleasures" gets on very well without the slightest romantic, let alone sexual, element. The central love-triangle theme evidently isn't quite as vital a feature as one would assume!
(In fact, the line that got me -- given my own predilections -- was the sociopathic Edward's casual invitation to suicide as a preferred option to being devoured by ghouls: "I'll do you first if you want, or you can do it yourself"...)
With hindsight, the plot is a bit incoherent (again, not altogether uncommon in film noir, where the fast-moving twists of the action don't always tie up in retrospect: who killed the chauffeur in Chandler's masterly "The Big Sleep"? Generations of fans have famously failed to notice and/or care). But Laurell K. Hamilton clearly had a potential winner here, and it's not surprising that sequels followed and accrued fans.
Later books certainly acquired sexual (albeit mainly unresolved) content, to the degree that they became furtive and rather guilty pleasures that I could no longer feel able to recommend in public. Unfortunately within the space of one or at the most two books, the author then apparently decided to drop off the titillation tightrope into full-blown porn -- with the usual tedium and predictably unarousing results. The series became not only embarrassing to read but thoroughly dull... and the quality of the writing dropped off the spectrum.
Did the real Laurell K. Hamilton die in a sinister car accident, to be replaced by a doppelganger? Did she just make the classic mistake of failing to realise when she had gone too far -- 'jumped the shark'? (Or failing to notice that with sex -- as with horror - a long build-up of suggestion is far more powerful than page after page of in-your-face reveal?)
Whatever happened, I gave up; and I didn't think I'd ever be reading Anita Blake again.
But I found myself forcibly reminded of just how effective the series started off to be...... and I found myself back at the library this afternoon, looking for "The Laughing Corpse". They didn't have it -- they didn't have many of the early books, although another three or four have apparently been tacked onto the end of the series(!) -- but they did have the third book, "The Circus of the Damned", and after some minutes of dithering I found myself with the lurid little paperback tucked furtively into my bag just as in the old days. Even more of a guilty pleasure now, with the character a byword for raw porn... but a quick flick across the Internet turns up hints that the latest Anita Blake books may even be going back to the detective format.
So I may even find myself approaching that long line of new titles with the caution of the long-disappointed optimist...
It was "The Laughing Corpse" that originally hooked me, the sequel to this one, casually encountered on the library shelves one afternoon, and I didn't actually get to read "Guilty Pleasures" for some years, although I worked through most of the sequels as I tracked them down in various libraries. So it wasn't nostalgia that got my goat.
It was sheer frustration at the waste of it all: a great premise, an intriguing set of characters (poor Philip gets such short shrift in the later books that I didn't even remember his existence: those valedictory grave-visits can't have lasted long, I'm afraid), and a stonking hard-boiled film noir style ("Willie McCoy had been a jerk before he died. His being dead didn't change that..." -- an attention-grabbing opening line that wouldn't have put Dashiell Hammett to shame). The author really had something here -- why, oh why, did she end up throwing it all away in what was to become such utterly self-indulgent (and badly written) trash?
Interestingly, there is no romance in this first book. I think it's probably true that it was the Unresolved Sexual Tension between Anita Blake and her rival suitors that gives force to most of the series (and alas, runs absolutely true to form in that once it is actually resolved in both cases, this force loses almost all its effect -- it's no coincidence that the only successful book after this is "Obsidian Butterfly", in which Anita returns to her original abstinence), but in fact "Guilty Pleasures" gets on very well without the slightest romantic, let alone sexual, element. The central love-triangle theme evidently isn't quite as vital a feature as one would assume!
(In fact, the line that got me -- given my own predilections -- was the sociopathic Edward's casual invitation to suicide as a preferred option to being devoured by ghouls: "I'll do you first if you want, or you can do it yourself"...)
With hindsight, the plot is a bit incoherent (again, not altogether uncommon in film noir, where the fast-moving twists of the action don't always tie up in retrospect: who killed the chauffeur in Chandler's masterly "The Big Sleep"? Generations of fans have famously failed to notice and/or care). But Laurell K. Hamilton clearly had a potential winner here, and it's not surprising that sequels followed and accrued fans.
Later books certainly acquired sexual (albeit mainly unresolved) content, to the degree that they became furtive and rather guilty pleasures that I could no longer feel able to recommend in public. Unfortunately within the space of one or at the most two books, the author then apparently decided to drop off the titillation tightrope into full-blown porn -- with the usual tedium and predictably unarousing results. The series became not only embarrassing to read but thoroughly dull... and the quality of the writing dropped off the spectrum.
Did the real Laurell K. Hamilton die in a sinister car accident, to be replaced by a doppelganger? Did she just make the classic mistake of failing to realise when she had gone too far -- 'jumped the shark'? (Or failing to notice that with sex -- as with horror - a long build-up of suggestion is far more powerful than page after page of in-your-face reveal?)
Whatever happened, I gave up; and I didn't think I'd ever be reading Anita Blake again.
But I found myself forcibly reminded of just how effective the series started off to be...... and I found myself back at the library this afternoon, looking for "The Laughing Corpse". They didn't have it -- they didn't have many of the early books, although another three or four have apparently been tacked onto the end of the series(!) -- but they did have the third book, "The Circus of the Damned", and after some minutes of dithering I found myself with the lurid little paperback tucked furtively into my bag just as in the old days. Even more of a guilty pleasure now, with the character a byword for raw porn... but a quick flick across the Internet turns up hints that the latest Anita Blake books may even be going back to the detective format.
So I may even find myself approaching that long line of new titles with the caution of the long-disappointed optimist...
no subject
Date: 2011-10-05 04:17 am (UTC)(I'd heard that anecdote about the chauffeur so many times before I read The Big Sleep that I was almost disappointed when I figured it out first try. I'm fairly sure Chandler knew the answer when he was writing the book, too, even if he'd forgotten later - it gives me the feeling of one of those cases where the author, because he knows what's going on, thinks it's more obvious than it is and doesn't put quite enough cluing in for the people who can only read the words, not the author's mind. Which is to say that I can see why it's obscure, and I don't blame anybody who doesn't get it. And, as you say, not knowing doesn't ruin the story.)
no subject
Date: 2011-10-11 12:28 am (UTC)So far as (a) goes, the violence quotient is high: this stuff predates the teen vampire craze and the creatures of Anita's world are fairly monstrous. Some of the humans aren't too wonderful either (and over the course of the series the heroine too becomes more and more hardened: in the first book we are presented with the character Edward as a self-evident sociopath, but by the ninth Anita Blake is arguably more damaged herself than he is).
So far as (b) goes, it starts off with innuendo and eventually escalates to full-blown embarrassing -- some of this stuff you really don't want anyone reading over your shoulder. Fans who can't take it seem to fall between the group who reckon the author betrayed the character when things get explicit after book 5 ("Bloody Bones") and those who can't stand anything after book 9 ("Obsidian Butterfly"). There evidently are people who went on buying the next eight or so books after that (apparently the author claims to have the highest young male readership in the vampire genre... I suspect one can guess why...) but apparently they are not quite so vocal about it!
I'm not particularly comfortable about a good deal of the more titillating material -- the idea that the lycanthropes go in for touchy-feely contact and sleeping together naked because they are more in touch with their animal side, for instance -- but I can live with that because the narrator is presented as not being comfortable with it either (and because, however much it may be intended to titillate, within the context of the setting it is presented as essentially non-sexual behaviour). And as long as Anita keeps batting back -- not-so-subtly -- the advances of the ever-growing stud of long-haired supernaturally attractive males(!) who populate her environment, I can put up with that, although I don't find it terribly plausible.
The only area in which the porn works for me is in the clichéd reserve marked "sex-within-a-loving-relationship" (yes, I'm intensely conservative), and in that camp I fall into the Book 9 category: I feel, uncharacteristically, that the high sex quotient does actually serve a function as a release in the context of what has by that point become a very emotionally charged situation -- the main trouble is that once she has eventually Done It with both characters there isn't really anywhere else for that particular plotline to go, while the author (and her readership) have by that point become somewhat addicted to it. It's a question of beware what you ask for: books 10 and onwards rapidly degenerate into sexual self-parody.
* * *
Basically, this is horror fiction with a hard-boiled detective spin (we won't even consider the half of the series that is apparently heavy porn with a horror spin...) plus an increasing helping of soap opera. Conflicts of loyalty is my thing, so I find the angst effective: otherwise you might want to stick to the early ones, which feature more humour and less heart-searching. And if you don't care for horror, you won't like this -- bits of it are very gruesome and/or violent.