Anita Blake: Guilty Pleasures

[lliira]

I'm trying to read LKH's first Anita Blake book, Guilty Pleasures. Trying. On the third page, Anita mentions that vampires have just gotten certain rights. And one of the problems is, if someone you inherited money from becomes a vampire, do you get to keep their inheritance, because technically they are dead. And "was it murder to slay a vampire"?

Vampires have always existed openly in Anitaland. Always. Openly. And people are just now starting with this stuff?! 

Oh and also this guy Willie is giving Anita a tongue bath. He's coming to her for help, even though she isn't a private investigator, because she knows oh so much about vampires and no one else can possibly compare. He also notices she's quicker than any human could be on the fourth page. 

The entire first chapter is a man trying to talk Anita into doing something she doesn't want to do. Also: Anita has lots of guns, and tells us she knows how to use them. No, really? You have a lot of guns that you can actually use? Wow, how unusual! Most people with lots of guns think they are for potting plants.

In chapter 2, there is this line: "Catherine was a good friend, a name I knew" (7).

You know the name of a good friend? What are the odds?

That's as far as I've gotten. My husband managed to read the whole thing, and he told me what happens in it. I don't know if I'll be getting any farther. Because this is bad. 

Comments

[a-sporking-rat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, LKH's version of "has always been here, always been known about" seems much more "were just dumped into existence/discovered very recently".

I haven't read GP since high school but I can remember being irritated with Anita and thinking her voice obnoxious and she herself a Mary Sue even then, and that was when I *liked* the series.

[lliira]

Anita's voice in this book is definitely irritating me. My husband assures me that her moral sense is good in it, but I don't think I can like her. And when I don't like the protagonist, the writer has to be completely brilliant for me to be able to stand the book.

[(Anonymous)]

I read the book when it first came out, and it was just kind of a hoot. I was working in a bookstore, and the manager, whose taste was similar to mine, recommended it as just that. Anita wasn't a wonderful person, but it was an interesting world concept. It's hard to read the earlier books now because you can see all the awfulness foreshadowed.

The book fit just fine in the SF&F shelf at our store, and it was part of an explosion, not of urban fantasy, but of books with female main characters. A lot of the well-known female PI series began around then; people like Barbara Hambly were writing books with strong and interesting female characters.

If you read further, you'll get Anita undercover in a houseful of swingers in the countryside outside of St. Louis, and Edward ditto, and Anita in some situations in which she legitimately had to fear for her life.

[lliira]

Oh god LKH writing swingers. Yeah, I won't be reading any more of this one. I hate LKH's worldbuilding (which is basically nonexistent) and writing style and main character from word one, and the early books don't have the trainwreck quality to keep me entertained.

I read lots of books with female main characters before 1993, mostly in the sword and sorcery genre. Back then I would only read books with female main characters (unless they were by Agatha Christie), and I never felt a lack of reading material.