by Ardeur- 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series (mobi)
Anita lives in a world where the monster isn’t just under the bed, there’s a good chance he delivered it. This is where the feminine perspective really comes into its own as we suddenly find ourselves looking at the world not through the lens of physical superiority that the male subconscious is equipped with, but with the constant, rolling threat-assessment of the female subconscious. For the horror heroine, potential danger is everywhere, and for all her abilities, all her politicking, all her partners, it’s all Anita can do to keep one step ahead of the countless dangers she’s surrounded by. While Anita eventually comes to accept her distance from humanity, she still keeps one eye on the people she chooses to spend her life with.
Anita not only recognizes her differences, she relishes them, turns them inward and uses them as tools and weapons instead of burdens to bear. She’s aware that she’s different, aware that she’s not quite different enough, and crucially, aware of how useful that last realization can be.
A lesser character would simply visit this metaphorical dark side of the street, this place where morality is negotiable and alliances are as important as friendships. This is the place inhabited by the werewolves and vampires of supernatural fiction and the desperate, lonely criminals and police officers of crime fiction. It’s also the place Raymond Chandler talks about in his iconic quote:
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
Anita doesn’t just walk down Chandler’s mean streets, she lives on them, shops on them, and dates on them as well. This is a woman who lives in two pairs of worlds: the normal and the preternatural, horror and crime. In many ways she’s a PI in the wrong genre, a woman who balances compassion and intellect with physicality in a very similar way to Val McDermid’s Kate Brannigan or Liza Cody’s Eva Wylie. Anita, while steeped in the preternatural world, is able to see through and past it to deal with people as individuals, and do so with “rude wit” and an extremely “lively sense of the grotesque.” Where Dolph sees something to be feared and destroyed, sees the blank white face of Lon Chaney or Peter Lorre dancing just beyond the torchlight, Anita sees the fear in their eyes, the desperation in their actions. She’s compassionate and open and drawn to them as her people, even as she’s checking exits and making sure she knows where her weapons are. But as Anita becomes more and more caught up in the world outside the light, she begins to wonder which side of the street she really belongs on. And so she—both literally and metaphorically—steps out into the darkness, faces the monster down, and does the one thing the mob can’t or won’t do: meets the monster on its terms. As a result, the very nature of horror, as presented in the books, changes. Horror has often been about absence, about seeing something awful just beyond the light of the campfire. Shelley’s monster, Lovecraft’s deathless elder gods, Halloween’s Michael Myers, the Gentlemen of Buffy‘s “Hush,” and the demons of Supernatural all operate within this principle, and are all denizens of the other side of the street, of the place most of us would prefer not to go and would rather not think about. Don’t leave the campfire; don’t go off somewhere to make out; never ever say you’ll “be right back.” These have been the touchstones of horror for so long that they’ve not only become an unofficial gospel but have directly led to the boom in self-referential horror in the nineties. The half-glimpsed form in the darkness became a merchandising leviathan, and as horror stepped out into the light it began to change on an almost primal level, beginning with the meta-textual, self-referential Scream series and moving through mainstream parodies to the bizarre, splintered set of subgenres cinematic horror is today.
This is where Anita is an actively subversive figure, the first one through the door and out into a world that sits next to ours but doesn’t play by the same rules. Her eventual willingness to embrace what lives in the shadows not only changes her but changes it, dragging it out into the light and giving the bogeyman edges, a face, a name, a personality. This willingness to stare darkness in the face and, if needed, buy it a drink has led to a sea change that has been felt through much of contemporary horror. After decades of the masculine viewpoint being dominant and the monster being something to be feared and destroyed, the feminine viewpoint has taken control, and now the monster is something to understand first and destroy, if necessary, second. At first glance, this newfound normalcy robs traditional monsters of much of their menace and, more importantly, their charm. But as the Anita Blake novels progress, the usual trappings of vampires and lycanthropes largely fall away, and they become something more than the stereotype, something more interesting than pantomime fangs and fake furry hands: people. Each of the supporting cast are revealed to have their own agendas, their own traumas, and their own perspectives on events in Anita’s increasingly complicated life. The transformation of Jean-Claude is a particularly good example of this. Initially set up as an antagonist, he goes so far as using threats against the life of Richard Zeeman, Anita’s first lycanthrope partner, to get her to date him in The Lunatic Café. He’s a curious figure, one part Machiavellian politician and one part tragic antihero, and it’s only as the novels go on that we begin to learn why he is the way he is. Jean-Claude feels tremendous affection for his friends but is all too aware of the appalling danger that places them in. As a result, he walls himself off from everyone but those closest to him in order to protect them. His attraction to Anita flies in the face of this practice, and trying to figure out whether that attraction is born from his recognition of her power or genuine love makes for fascinating reading. Superficially, Jean-Claude is a monster, but as the series goes on we discover his motivations, which makes him become one of the series’ most sympathetic characters. He’s still a monster but, as Anita and the reader learn together, monsters can be just as complicated as people.
It’s this newfound depth that not only replaces the traditional bogeyman approach but also, almost overnight, completely changes the landscape of horror fiction. The idea that the monsters are as complicated and interesting as we are isn’t a new one, but embracing it to this degree certainly is, and it leads to some fascinating, challenging stories both within the series and beyond it. The monster becomes someone you pass on the street, and that acceptance replaces uncertainty as the basis of fear. Ivy, in Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan series, is both a fascinating, beautiful woman and something so unutterably alien that Rachel has trouble being in the same room with her for much of the first book. Likewise, in the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris, and especially in the TV adaptation True Blood, what makes Bill the vampire genuinely terrifying isn’t his undead status but the fact that he’s a polite, charming Southern gentlemen. The monsters look like us, they talk like us, they have the same desires as us, but that familiarity is laced with something attractive, inhuman, and incredibly dangerous.
But for all that danger, all the monsters Anita walks with, works with, and sleeps with, one of the largest dangers she faces is a human she’s forced to work with. Olaf, introduced in Obsidian Butterfly, is arguably the series’ first truly monstrous protagonist. A former intelligence officer, Olaf is a serial murderer and rapist etained by the U.S. government on the condition that he keeps most of his sprees outside the country’s borders. With his single-minded rage and need to commit violence, Olaf is at least as savage, if not more so, than the preternatural characters of the series, a hulking embodiment of death who becomes obsessed by hunting with—or simply hunting—Anita. He’s the embodiment of physical danger, a permanently cocked trigger with no regard for human life, and Anita’s reaction to him shows exactly how well developed her instincts have become: “A part of me screamed, kill him now. the rest of me really didn’t disagree with that little voice” (The Harlequin).
If any character would be fodder for the traditional horror lynch mob, it’s Olaf. But even here, Hamilton refuses to let her characters off easily. Olaf has just enough education to perform, just enough awareness to realize what he is and that, on some level, Anita represents an opportunity for him to change. Olaf is a monster, that’s a given; but he’s a monster who sees himself differently through Anita, and in doing so, he has the potential to change for the better. Whether that’s possible or even acceptable is unclear, but what isn’t is Anita’s stoic, grounded refusal to take the easy way out and hate Olaf unconditionally. She’s been on the dark side of the street for too long and can see far too well to allow herself that luxury.
There is, of course, a second possibility: that Olaf is drawn to Anita the same way she was drawn to Jean-Claude, as a predator recognizing its place in the food chain and and feeling both a fear of and attraction to the more powerful creatures above it. Viewed this way, it becomes clear that the changes Anita undergoes across the series aren’t just in response to the threats she encounters but are threats in and of themselves. Anita may feel distanced from humanity, but she understands that distance and is aware of what it implies: that Dolph may be right, that she may be willingly surrendering her humanity to a world of monsters wearing beautiful masks. It’s a complex, uneasy question that provides a backdrop of tension to the later books in particular and places the whole series in a very different and potentially very disturbing light. Because, in the end, for all her hard work and training, the biggest threat to Anita may be Anita herself.
In fact, looked at in further detail, there’s some compelling circumstantial evidence for this. She buries herself in the preternatural, and the world she finds there (and one reading of the books) is that she does so to embrace the only part of the world that has ever truly embraced her. Another reading is that Anita surrounds herself with monsters not only because that’s the only place she feels at home, but because she’s afraid monsters are the only people that can stop her if she ever grows too powerful. The most compelling thought speaks to her pragmatic nature: that Anita wants to feel comfortable, to accept herself and be accepted. She walks in the dark because that’s where the answers lie, and she makes the sacrifices she does with the understanding, and the hope, that she won’t have to do so forever.
Regardless of her reasons, Anita Blake was one of the first characters to walk across the street, to not only understand the monsters but actively question them, connect with them, and, in doing so, understand them. She’s a catalyst, a figure around whom immense narrative change has coalesced and led to some of the most interesting developments in modern horror, part of a new wave who have taken the genre largely for their own and changed it for the better. In doing so, Anita has faced down and killed the one monster that is truly unreasoning, unthinking, and savagely and randomly violent: Anita Blake has been instrumental in the death of the lynch mob, banishing them back to their village forever and letting the Things That Should Not Be out into the light. It may not be a safer world, but thanks to Anita and Laurell K. Hamilton, it’s a far more interesting one.
Alasdair Stuart is the host of Pseudopod (www.pseudopod.org), the winner of the 2009 Parsec Award for Best Speculative Fiction Magazine or Anthology Podcast. He edits Hub (www.hubfiction.com), a free weekly PDF genre fiction magazine, and his nonfiction has appeared in The Guardian, Neo, Death Ray, Sci Fi Now, and many more. He blogs for SFX (www.sfx.co.uk) and Bleeding Cool (www.bleedingcool.com) and is an active roleplaying game writer, currently hard at work on material for the official Doctor Who Roleplaying Game. He lives in the north of England with his wife and not quite enough models of the TARDIS.
This essay was full of surprises and insights for me as a writer. i had never realized how much Richard’s squeamishness at being the best werewolf he can be pushes Anita time and again into being a better monster than he is to save him, save others, save herself. And protecting those weaker than you is my measure for worth; of course, my judgment of what constitutes weaker may not be everyone’s.
As for Jean-Claude growing as a character from the beginning, I never thought I wrote vampire novels. I always wrote novels about people who happened to be vampires, or werewolves, or necromancers. I could never sit down and think, I’ll write a story about vampires, without thinking what would it do to a person to be immortal, ageless, always beautiful, super strong, super fast, able to control the minds of other people, and needing to see other human beings as food. What would that do to you as a person? What would it do to you in a century? Two centuries? Longer? What would that do to your character? That was how I created Jean-Claude, and Asher, and all the other vampires in my world. First they must be people, and only second anything else.
The exceptions to that are, strangely, my human characters like Edward and Olaf. They were created to be perfect killers, and only slowly did they reveal more to me. Edward especially has surprised the hell out of me over the years. I didn’t learn about the fiancée and the kids until about two sentences before Anita did in Obsidian Butterfly. You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather. Olaf was supposed to be a serial killer and a true monster, but even he has surprised me. He’s still one of the scariest characters I’ve ever created, but the fact that he has female fans that want him and Anita to become a couple creeps me more than my fictional killer. High eww factor.
Micah was originally supposed to be a villain and a huge betrayal for Anita, but from the moment he stepped on stage he refused to be a bad guy. From the first moment he saw Anita he saw in her safety and a home for him and his wereleopard pard, and he was willing to do anything, anything, to have that with her. Anita needed a helpmate, a true partner, and in Micah she found it.
But Natasha is right that it’s been Nathaniel who has done more to domesticate Anita than any other man in her life. In fact Natasha made some points about the evolution of their relationship that I hadn’t quite seen myself. The best nonfiction about your own work makes you rethink it, and go, oh, of course. It wasn’t just Anita that didn’t see how she felt about Nathaniel for books; I didn’t see it either. I guess for a real-life parallel my husband, Jonathon, and I thought we were just friends long after all of our friends knew we were more. We argued for a long time that we were just friends. Anita and I argued for a long time that we didn’t love Nathaniel, couldn’t love him. Methinks the lady doth protest too much, and so does the author.
Most poignant for me was Natasha quoting the dialogue from Incubus Dreams where Anita is willing to sacrifice everyone but Nathaniel. I honestly didn’t see that then, and so how could Anita have a clue, if I didn’t? Sometimes your characters are more real than even you understand; they sort of sneak up on you, and take your hand and lead you to domestic bliss that you never planned for your main character, and make you wistful for a wife of your own. Jonathon and I both agree that having a third who is more domestically talented would be swell, it’s just the emotional upkeep that makes Anita and me wonder at that whole extra person. In real life there are no rewrites tomorrow after the fight today.
—Laurell
The Domestication of a Vampire Executioner
by Natasha Fondren
Anita Blake is a monster killer, a sometimes murderer, a once-in-awhile torturer. She’s an executioner of vampires— the shortest executioner of vampires in the United States—but don’t let that fool you: Anita Blake has the highest kill count of any vampire executioner in the nation, possibly the world. And that’s just counting the legal kills.
She’s not exactly someone you want to take home and introduce to your mother, someone you imagine making dinner, walking the dog, or dropping the kids off at soccer practice. She’s been called a sociopath, a zombie queen, and coffin bait. She’s a necromancer, a master vampire (somehow without really being a vampire), a succubus, and the human servant of the Master of the City.
She is not your girl next door.
And she doesn’t want to be. She never has. At the beginni
ng of the series, Anita prefers coming home to an empty apartment when she’s done raising the dead for the night. It’s quiet there: peaceful and private. She can wash off the goat’s blood and the zombie goo with a hot shower, cuddle with her stuffed penguin, enjoy having a kitchen she doesn’t cook in—a kitchen no one cooks in.
Her ideal pets? Fish. As she says: “You don’t walk them, pick up after them, or have to housebreak them. Clean the tank occasionally, feed them, and they don’t give a damn how many hours of overtime you work” (The Laughing Corpse).
No one knows what happens to the pet fish. They disappear in later books. They never die and then swim into her bed sheets, which is better luck than Anita’s had with past pets, like the dead dog that crawled in her bed while she was sleeping. Or the road kill that her powers accidentally animated, and the dead-by-suicide professor who knocked on her dorm room door.
And she doesn’t just raise the dead; she executes the undead. Anita Blake believes it is her life’s mission to save the world from the monsters: the werewolves and the vampires and the demons. She is anything but a candidate for domestication. Like the cats she carries in her bloodstream, she is wild, unable to be tied down or put behind a fence, white or otherwise.