Let me get a drink. No, a bigger drink. Right, let’s dive
into this one
When this book started I actually felt hope. Actual, real
hope. Because we had a storyline – an actual storyline that drew on previous
world building and involved Anita working with the police and solving crime and
even *gasp* actually doing zombie stuff. It was the same kind of false
hope Affliction gave me. Alas,
hope is a cruel, fickle mistress
We opened with Anita helping to track down a zombie sex trafficking
ring, a ring that has zombies with souls being used as sex slaves which is
something that she’s seen before. It could have been interesting, involved lots
of police work and woo-woo…. Except after that introduction we then put that
entire storyline on hold for over 300 pages, it barely comes up again for the
rest of the book. Whyyy? You had a plot here! There was plot! Why ignore it?
So what did we have instead? Endless humping? Actually
no, the last few Anita Blake books have actually managed to escape the trap of
being porn. Rather than have endless sex we tend to have endless talking about
who Anita should have sex with
This is not better.
Part of what consumes the book is the sheer
longwindedness of distractions which I’ve said over and over. Anita is
investigating a crime, so why are we spending this much time talking about her
engagement with one of the FBI agents? Before they even play the tape (they
have tapes? Actual tapes? Who has tapes? I’m sure there’s a whole generation of
actual adults now who don’t even know what a tape is) with the terribad zombie
porn on it, we have 2 solid pages of them discussing how terrible it will be
and how the site will bother them. 2 pages. Just play the damn tape already –
mooooove.
This is the writing throughout the book. That same scene
with them waiting to play the tape comes with an aside about the
ethics/morality/opinions of Anita marrying a vampire (why are you discussing it
with these people? Is no-one here going to pretend to be a professional?). The
entire first chapter is literally “we need you to look at these tapes” which
they don’t watch until chapter 2! And even then they start discussing the
police force’s acronym before playing the tape. The acronym.
Again I have to say how this continues through the book
with lots of pointless moments like super-excessive description of the
gym/showers under the Circus of the Damned or just endless recaps of her many
many many many relationships or her spending like 5 pages deciding which
shifters can share a bed with her so she can heal.
So other than long windedness, what else fills the space?
Stuff
That’s the problem – there’s less a plot here but more a
series of events that don’t really add anything or help in anyway to advance
the story or expand anything – they’re just random encounters. Like there’s a
painfully long diversion in a book where Anita raises a zombie and it all goes
a little wrong so they have to fix it. There’s some ghouls in there as well.
And the whole thing could have been cut and made into a short story because it
wasn’t even slightly relevant to the main plot, the storyline or add anything
to the character or the world building or anything else
There’s some random woo-woo going on which changes Micah’s
shapeshiftyness. There’s Jean-Claude and Anita’s wedding. There’s Asher again
screwing everything up just because. There’s Narcissus screwing everying up
just because.
But there’s also a lot of mini scenes that just bemuse
me. Like a scene where Anita has to spend a painfully long time putting an
uppity werewolf in his place for sexualising her (more on that later). Or
another scene where Anita has to. Oh and one of the werelions is beating up
another werelion and Meng Die is being all nasty about it and Rafael is facing
fights for leadership oh and the jeweller Jean-Claude has chosen to design
their wedding rings is actually secretly in love with… OH MY GODS WHO CARES?!
WHY IS THIS HERE! WHY? WHY AM I READING PAGES ABOUT THE DAMN JEWELLER YOU
HIRED?! WHY?!
This is the book. Endless, pointless nonsense scenes
after endless pointless nonsense scenes all randomly glued together without any
sense of whether they’re relevant or not. And it wouldn’t be so bad if I had
even the slightest faith that ANY of these storylines would go anywhere. I mean
Micah and Raphael struggling politically and facing threats? INTERESTING
STORYLINE! Can we do this? Can we examine this? No because we have the fecking
tigers
Yes, the fecking tigers. Because of some random prophecy
someone just remembered we now have to have Anita marry a tiger. Which means
looking through all the various tigers and seeing who is possible and who isn’t
and why with lots of angst and pouting and relationship nonsense and hurt
feelings and pouting and aaaaaagle whyyyyyy?
Then ironic thing is I’m pretty sure the Anita Blake series is supposed to be
totally pro-polygamy, all very positive about multi-person relationships and
how wonder they were (Afflication
wasn’t exactly subtle about this), but it fails epicly. The polyamory presented
in this series is PAINFULLY hard work. Anita’s romantic and family lie is a
trainwreck of constant struggle constant angst, constant jealously, constantly
juggling and balancing endless hurt feelings and woe. Anita Blake’s love life is one full of angst, pain, upset, various
people having their hearts broken, Anita Blake being utterly self-centred and
pretty indifferent as to how her clan interacts between them. Generally,
polyamory is presented as an emotional trainwork, extremely hard work with lots
of jealousy and sniping and spite with a level of drama that consumes your life
It’s not positive.
This book continues the theme of being utterly toxic to
LGBTQ people as well. No doubt many people have hard of the Kinsey Scale,
raging from 0 (exclusively attracted to people of the opposite sex) through to
6 (exclusively attracted to people of the same-sex)
Well in the Anitaverse it also comes with a contempt
level – the higher up the Kinsey scale you are, the less important you’ll be
through to you actually being terrible and contemptible and pathetic
So, the main characters are all either completely straight
or completely straight but they have one exception no-homo-no-homo-no-homo and
can’t mention that exception without totally mentioning how they’re not into
the same-sex. Again.
These characters are the main, important characters who have a level of respect
and importance in the book: Anita, Richard, Micah, Jean-Claude, Raphael. These
are the important alphas who may dip into same-sex sex but are definitely
straight barring the odd exception
Then we have bisexuals who lean towards the opposite sex like
Nathaniel. They’re not as alpha or in charge as the straight-with-exceptions
folk but we can still respect them because at least they prefer the opposite
sex and only bring up same-sex loving occasionally and when Anita thinks it’s
hot (because fetishism continues). After that we have bisexuals who seem to be
equally inclined both ways – Devil (yes really) who so far is pretty much a
non-character except for moping and his weakness in the
last book (yup,
that pattern again).
Then we get the trainwreck – bisexuals who prefer the
same sex like Asher are dramatic, pathetic, destructive, selfish and utterly incapable
of keeping their shit together with Asher almost causing massive political
crisis because he’s so pathetic and useless and ridiculous and emotional. And
there’s his gay partner, Kane, who is just evil, spiteful, selfish, dramatic,
jealous and willing to manipulate things to destroy everything while dropping
nasty homophobic topes. Of course Anita had to humiliate him as well. Then we
have Narcissus, a gay, intersex man who has his genitals described in an ultra
other-ing manner, is manipulative, selfish, ineffective, a terrible ruler
losing the respect of his capable werehyenas (i.e. straight) as opposed to his
old,
easily manipulated, weak gay cohort. Naturally Anita puts him in his place
and humiliates him. We have a brief reference of Jade, the terribly abused
lesbian who hates all men who they keep trying to force into a relationship
with a man anyway because who cares about abuse and how dare a lesbian not want
to have sex with men – she’s just petty and weak and pathetic and causing
drama. Oh and we reference J.J. Jason’s girlfriend who is totally a lesbian in
a dedicated long term relationship with Jason because gay people not having sex
with the opposite sex is intolerable.
Anita seems to be shopping for 3 new bisexual women to
add to her harem, possibly because we’ve finally realised just how few women
there are in this series. But even that is fraught – with minimal female
presence in this book we still have one woman proving how strong she is because
she is so big and strong and muscly (therefore, like Claudia, has sufficiently
transcended feminity in this series’ eyes so she can be above contempt) and a woman
she keeps beating on sobbing away because she’s so female and weak and female
and thought she could be as good as the others but no she’s just too small and
female.
We then have Meng Die who is sexual and evil and sexy
evil and evil sexy. That’s pretty much it. We have Lita, a new wererat guard
who is sexually out of control and unprofessional and needed putting in her
place. We have another female guard who was leery of the male dominated locker
room and got Anita to escort her…
…look there aren’t a lot of women in this book and when
they appear it’s for very brief moments – like Manny’s wife or the 3 bisexual
recruits – but despite these tiny roles we have a lot of them either being evil
and/or sexy (needing put in their place by Anita) or weak and needing rescuing/supporting
be Anita. This
is a pattern with this series. Again.
Ok, POC – they’re there. Look that about all I can say.
Anita has her Latino heritage but, as we’ve said repeatedly no cultural context
and every time her black hair and dark eyes are mentioned we also hear how very
very very very pale she is. What is the racial equivalent of “no homo”?. We
have Raphael but other than being there and needing help there wasn’t a lot
more
There were a large number of POC when taking into account
side characters and the 8 gazillion guards. But lots of Black, Latino and Asian
guards doesn’t really change the fact that they’re pretty much names but the
main characters are all pretty much White. We have Manny make a brief return
but, again, it was pretty limited and even that was largely focused on his
terribad past and Anita rescuing his family
Inevitably this is getting really really long so I’m
going to hit something else: Consent
and rape.
Anita finally confronts the weretiger rape orgy where the
Mother of all Darkness used her woo-woo to force Anita and 3 weretigers to have
sex. Anita confronts that it was rape… but it’s not to analyse the importance
of consent, or even really to acknowledge that the other three men were
victims. It’s used for an excuse to justify why Anita doesn’t want the 19 year
old in a relationship with her
This is where the book series has reached. We can’t
analyse rape and consent as issues in their own right. No, it is there so Anita
has an EXCUSE not to marry a teenager. And it says so much that we need an
excuse. Oh and that she’s so silly for feeling embarrassed about going to
parent’s evening the school for the teenager she’s fucking. Uh-huh.
Facing this terrible realisation Anita seeks comfort… in
the arms of Micah. Micah. Who raped her in Narcissus
in Chains. Oh and we still have Nicky around, the werelion Anita mind
controlled and has to follow her every single instruction no matter how casual
yet she still doesn’t see it as ethically compromising to decide he’s her “lover”
and have sex with him. If anything, the brief attempt to address consent issues
just highlights how terrible this series is with consent.
I’m also going to say again how terrible this
book – this series – is at calling out any kind of prejudice. There’s not
even the slightest attempt at subtlety so we have the werewolf deciding to
thrust his genitals at Anita so she can spend a scene saying how terrible he
is. This happens all the time in this series – people throw out ridiculously
overt bigotry even in situations where even someone with half an ounce of sense
would tone it down just so Anita can Teach Them a Lesson. Microaggressions,
coded language etc Nope, none of that – it’s the big hammer of over bigotry or nothing.
OK this got seriously long and I finish another Anita
Blake book disappointed. Because for a moment I had hope, I had a brief brief
moment of hope that this book would have some plot. Just some plot – but it was
not to be. The book meandered off into ever more confusing and unnecessary
tangents before finally realising they needed to get back on track… but only at
the very end of the book and to a very hurried, belated conclusion.
