Guilty Pleasures (1993)

This book was recommended to me several times by my sister-in-law over the last 15 or 20 years so I finally decided to read it.

It was a fast read, I'll say that. And kind of fun. It's not a scary supernatural vampire book, but not as amusing as, say, Betsy the Vampire Queen. It's not really my style of book and I really had my doubts when the wererats came into the picture. I mean, seriously, wererats?

And of course there's zombies and vampires and ghouls. All set in an alternate St. Louis reality with animators and vampire hunters being the norm around town.

Like I said, it was fun and I didn't take it too seriously. I don't know whether I'll read the next one or not. Time will tell. How much do I really want to know about the relationship between Jean-Claude and Anita? ( )

Book 1 in the Anita Blake urban fantasy series. Anita is an Animator--she can raise the dead. She works for a company that raises the dead for hire--to clarify contested wills, to give people closure. She also is a consultant for the St Louis police. And vampires have recently received some civil rights. Oh, and Anita is called The Executioner because she kills vampires.

This book centers around murders of powerful vampires. A thousand-year-old vampire want sot know who is killing them, or Anita will pay the ultimate price.

In the meantime, hot, sexy vampire Jean-Claude had designs on Anita. He has marked her twice, which means he can communicate with her. By the fourth mark, he'll have her under his control.

This was a fun read, fast moving. There are many books in the series. I've been told the quality goes down somewhere around book 12, but I'm willing to keep reading for now. I'm on to the next book. ( )

Way better on audio than it was physically to read !!!!! Still not the best thing I have ever read, I heard that the books get better as they go on though so perhaps I'll try book 2 and see what happens. I disliked some of the humour and some of the characters a lot, and plot points were lacking. ( )

Well this was a disappointment. A lot of readers loved this book. However, I never could get into the story and it began to feel like a slog.

The main reason I was not a fan is that it suffered greatly from lack of character development. Because of this I never connected with the MC, Anita, or became invested in the story. However, there was a lot of action... a lot of action. So much so that I felt there were a couple of scenes that could have been deleted. They didn't add anything to the plot and I felt they were unnecessary.

I have no plans to continue on with the series. I am bummed about it since I was hoping for so much more.

This is such an incoherent mess, I barely know where to start.

It moves fast, I'll give it that. The constant action has a whirlwind effect, drawing you forward in hopes that something will eventually make sense (it doesn't). It felt like the book was written in one stream of consciousness dump. The result is rampant inconsistency in characterization and plot holes the size of the St Louis Arch.

The book neither demands nor rewards thought. The writing manages to alternate the pedestrian and the improbably lurid. This is the part where I lost any remnant of patience: "But there is another scent on the air, not just blood, but violence. Of course, violence has no smell."

With the possible exception of Anita, all of the characters are pointlessly vile, and there are a lot of them, poorly differentiated. Sure, vampires are likely to not be nice people, but it undercuts the whole "legal vampirism" thing if *all* of them constantly act like raging psychotics, taking out their own subordinates and threatening mortals (whom they supposedly want to do a job for them) in hysterically theatrical displays of rage. Everyone Anita works with, and her fellow occult experts? Horrible people.

The setting manages to be both grim and ridiculous, with no effort made to explain how society works with all of these undead around, but plenty of blood and torture. For all of their centuries of experience, the vampires get amazingly careless when fighting Anita.

I read this because I was curious about its popularity and status as a sort of urban fantasy keystone. Now I'm just baffled. ( )