The Killing Dance

Laurell K Hamilton's background in animal ethnology adds a lot to the mix in this book; Anita has to do some long hard thinking about what it means to be in love with a man who changes to wolf. --Roz Kaveney

Amazon.com
Anita Blake, vampire hunter, is now herself a hunted woman. Who put the $500,000 price on her head--a man or a monster? It's not just her own skin she needs to save; the rivalry between her werewolf boyfriend, Richard, and Marcus, the other alpha werewolf in his pack, has come to full boil. And there's always Jean-Claude, the vampire who's been waiting for just the right moment to slip inside Anita's head and heart. Don't assume anything, though--Hamilton's probably got a few more surprises in store.

Anita's love life is finding new levels above boiling and the price on her head is not helping things. While she has chosen to date Richard Zeeman the werewolf, Jean-Claude the master vampire of St. Louis is still the most beautiful corpse she has ever seen. But Richard is being challenged by Marcus, another alpha male in the pack, for the position of Ulfric and he refuses to deal with the challenge out of a position of strength (i.e., with quick and decisive violence), despite Anita's desperate council, which means this is going to be another bad ending for everybody concerned, especially since Marcus does not harbor any such moral illusions. Further complicating the issue is Rania, the sadistic lupa of Marcus, who makes S&M porn movies of shapeshifters with humans. Jean-Claude has his own problems, with the arrival in town of the ancient vampire Sabin, who wants Anita to cure him of the illness that is killing him. Sabine's human servant, Dominic Dumare, is a necromancer so Anita has more enemies to contend with this time around than any of the previous efforts.

From the vantage point of today looking back at this 1997 novel it is clear that this is the pivotal novel in the Anita Blake series. The one constant up to this point had been Anita's refusal to get off the fence and choose between Richard and Jean-Claude and for readers who were waiting for her to choose you could say that this decision has been made for her. But not only does she finally take one of them to bed, she finds a reason for not doing the same with the other. Either one of these would constitute a major development so having both of them in "The Killing Dance" is incredibly significance for all of the characters. Everything changes after this point, and very little of it in a good way.

But "The Killing Dance" also represents a significant change in Hamilton as a writer in that this is the point at which the sexuality in her stories becomes explicit. For many fans this is the point where they lament that the Anita Blake series "jumps the shark," and front this point on the balance between horror and sex really moves from the former to the latter. You are going to have to make up your mind on this score on your own. But reading this novel again I will argue that the big sex scene is far and away the best one Hamilton has written to date. What makes it so hot is not the explicit detail but rather than as far as sex scenes go this one was a long time coming, which underscores the problem Hamilton faces since you only have the first time once. Consequently it is all downhill from here.

However, even if you disagree with the direction in which Hamilton takes Anita Blake in the next half of the series, you should at least make it to this sixth novel, which still has enough horror to make sleeping difficult afterwards. Of course, since Edward extracts a promise from Anita to come help him in the future to repay his help during this crisis, you are at least going to have to keep reading until that debt is paid. That will be a while, so you might as well settle in for the long haul.