igenlode | The Laughing Corpse (Reply)

Before I start writing about this book in particular, I'll briefly mention a fan theory I came across on the Internet which goes a good way towards explaining the change in the emphasis of the 'new' Anita Blake books: it may or may not be correct, but it's worryingly plausible.

In short, it happened to be at this point in her writing that the author, Laurell K. Hamilton, split up with her husband and childhood sweetheart — who was apparently opposed to explicit sex scenes — and subsequently remarried to an enthusiastic fan of her novels; a change of beta-reader, a change of taste. And the fan-fantasies ran riot, to the detriment of the series but the wish-fulfilment of a young male audience...

I usually dislike reading authors' personal history into their novels, but in this case the argument seems all too compelling, I'm afraid. A critical first reader is every writer's best friend.

And that is the last I will say on that subject, or indeed on any of the resulting novels. It distracts from what I'm writing and suggests that the books I'm re-reading — the ones that initially hooked me — are bad; which they're not.

If "Guilty Pleasures" was a terrific first novel, then "The Laughing Corpse" is a brilliantly assured follow-up that improves on the original, both stylistically and in terms of plot. This was the slender volume that I casually picked off the library display, twenty or so years ago, and then couldn't put down; re-reading it now for perhaps the first time since, I'm gripped all over again.

I'd meant to savour it over several nights, but made the mistake of taking it with me into the bath only to find I simply couldn't bear to break off — by the end, I was literally shivering in the cooling water, but I still couldn't stop until I'd made it through the final chapter and laid it at last to rest. And I'd forgotten just how quotable this one is: line after sardonically turned line, begging to be repeated. I don't know how well they stand up out of context, but I'll try a few.

Anita battles with a frilly dress at the bridal shop: "The phone rang. Mrs Cassidy went to answer it, a lift in her step, a song in her heart, and me out of her shop. Joy in the afternoon."

At a colleague's funeral: "Peter Burke had been an animator. Not a very good one, but we are a small, exclusive club. If one of us dies, we all come. It's a rule. There are no exceptions. Maybe your own death, but then again being that we raise the dead for a living, maybe not." (And yes, I know that it was established in the previous novel that raising an animator from the dead is a really bad idea; but why let details get in the way of a good one-liner?)

On questioning a witness in the red-light district: "Pimps beware. I was bringing the Master as backup. It was like carrying a thermonuclear device to kill ants. Overkill has always been a speciality of mine."

One trend I hadn't noticed in the Anita Blake books the first time round but which shows up in retrospect turns out to be the use of multiple villains; "The Laughing Corpse" is no exception. Like every one of the other three I've looked at so far, it transpires that the story features at least two major enemies for Anita: crudely generalised, one will be responsible for the crime scene at the start of a novel, while a second powerful background figure will have to be faced down in the finale. The novels don't always follow the same pattern — for instance, the monstrous child-vampire-ruler Nikolaos in the first novel has nothing to do with the murders Anita is initially hired to investigate, while the calm and reasonable Mr. Oliver of "Circus of the Damned" turns out to be directly allied with the instigator of the group attacks in that book — but every single one includes threats from at least two separate directions.

In "The Laughing Corpse" we meet the final opponent right at the start of the story, in a classic set-piece opening chapter (giveaway: the villain is running his lawn sprinklers in the midst of a drought) that grabs the reader, re-establishes Anita's character, work-life and universe for a readership that couldn't yet be guaranteed to have read the previous volumes in the series, and sets up the plot précis on the back cover: certain zombies can only be raised by someone unscrupulous enough to perform human sacrifice. Meanwhile our heroine gets to fight off the attentions of one of the most memorable figures of evil in the series: the voodoo priestess Dominga Salvador, who is interested in Anita for her Mexican heritage (we get to learn a bit more about Anita's own backstory in this book) but who also represents in a story-external sense the protagonist's dark mirror. Anita could never become a Nikolaos or an immortal lamia, but only her scruples stand between her and ending up as a second Señora Dominga.

Perhaps one of the reasons this book is so effective is that ultimately it deals with purely human nastiness: there are no supernatural motivations here, no compulsions or territorial games. The author produces some chilling variations on the standard zombie template along with the concept of Anita's concern for 'zombie rights' (and if that sounds implausibly 'PC', there are a few examples in this book of what an unprincipled animator can do...), which is a strand that might have been interesting to see developed further.

By 'chilling' I don't necessarily mean gory, although as usual there's no shortage of that either. This book definitely fits under the category of 'horror fiction' rather than supernatural romance: it even pulls off the classic 'you really don't want to know what's in the basement' scare without resorting to cliché (and incidentally without anything violent actually happening...) despite also including some extremely bloody sequences.

Character-wise, we see some interesting development. This is the book which begins to 'humanise' Jean-Claude beyond his various stereotypes: from Anita's point of view he still veers between dangerous ally and (more often) dangerous annoyance, but we also get glimpses of his self-awareness and his reasons for refusing to relinquish Anita. "Whenever I begin to pretend to myself. Whenever I have delusions of life. I have only to look into your face and see the truth... Perhaps if Nikolaos had had such a mirror, she would not have been such a monster." Although the author jolts us with the reminder that 'humanity' is only relative: his underlings may believe him the most considerate master they have ever known, but the distinction proves to be between one who exploits their darkest fears to torture them for pure entertainment, and one who also does so but for strictly business reasons...

Meanwhile I was surprised to note that even as early as this Anita shocks her friend Ronnie by being prepared to shoot a man in cold blood if necessary to get information out of him; it's not quite such a long step as one had supposed to the Anita who will ultimately end up chopping a man's extremities off one by one in search of a greater good — and then feel guilty about not feeling guilty about it. On the other hand, it's a refreshing change to see that in this early book, on occasion Anita actually gets rescued by the police — "The hell with being cool and self-sufficient. 'Help me!'"— and is grateful for it, rather than she (or her author) insisting that she is the one and only person qualified to cope with a supernatural situation and needs to hold her end up as a woman besides.

One of the nice things about this novel in the series, I think, is the large cast of likeable 'normal' characters who interact with Anita; there's Irving the innocuous werewolf, Charles and Manny, her colleagues at Animators Inc., her friends Ronnie and Catherine, and the various policemen landed with the unpopular job on the 'Spook Squad', down to Dead Dave of the eponymous bar and Willie McCoy the smalltime crook. Not everyone is envious or out to get her, and a lot of the joshing is in a warm spirit.

As an introduction to Anita Blake, this was a good book to go for. Strictly speaking there are a number of unexplained references to the first volume in the series (perhaps unusually, no attempt is made to 'recap' Nikolaos or the whole business of the vampire marks at all), but I don't remember this bothering me at the time, or when I went on to the next book, while I think "The Laughing Corpse" is actually a better novel than "Guilty Pleasures" had been — not to mention the less suggestive title: I probably wouldn't have picked the former off the shelves in the first place! I would certainly recommend it as a supernatural thriller, the only caveats being the high level of horror and/or gore: using a zombie as a murder weapon precludes anything more subtle than the victims being physically torn apart...

Posted via m.livejournal.com.