The Laughing Corpse

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.

( Laurell K. Hamilton's private life )

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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. ( Quoted excerpts )

( Full review )

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...

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