Ardeur: 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  I mean, c’mon … that’s just cruel!

  It’s difficult to even conceive how it might have been to be a vampire before the landmark decision of Addison v. Clark in Anita’s reality that “gave us a revised version of what life was, and what death wasn’t” (Guilty Pleasures). Moving like a lizard in December, dragging my bloodless body out into the darkness to wait for someone to show up or going into public to bespell someone would make me want to go back to my coffin and hit the snooze alarm. I wouldn’t be a very good vampire.

  I’d do better as a shapeshifter. They can just order a hamburger at a fast food joint, or a rare sirloin at a steakhouse … all without raising suspicion. Even a shifter the size of a pony could get away with murder and explain it away easily to nosy neighbors—no telltale weapons to hide: “Raina sliced through the bloody apron. Two quick, hard slices. The clothes underneath were untouched” (The Lunatic Café). As a bonus, you can use your pets as scapegoats. Dig up your own back yard to bury your kill? Bad Fido! Track blood across the carpeting? Oh, that cat’s always dragging something inside. Then it’s just a quick trip to the all-night grocery across town for a rental steam cleaner. No fuss, no muss. There are no coffins to hide, you can mow at midday like the rest of the block, and you don’t have to avoid wooden furnishings that could become stake-fodder. It’s a snap to convince your friends that stainless steel is trendy—a less toxic substitute for silver tableware at Christmas.

  Even small private dinners tend to put odd behavior in the spotlight, but I think public gatherings would be the hardest part. For a vampire, being squarely under the suspicious gaze of the common citizen would be frustrating. People stare at pale people—either you’re a computer geek who has spent way too much time in front of a monitor, or you’re a vampire. Both are high on the avoidance list for the nightclub crowd … which is where I’d imagine most victims come from, judging by the scene in Jean-Claude’s place, described in Guilty Pleasures: “The room was full of liquor and laughter, and a few faked screams as the vampire waiters moved around the tables. There was an undercurrent of fear. That peculiar terror that you get on roller coasters and at horror movies. Safe terror.” Beer-goggles could easily take the place of bespelling before that crucial first meal, and drunk people aren’t terribly careful about who they leave bars with. Even when their partners for the night are oddly pale people with a tendency toward lace.

  Let’s talk about clothes for a minute. Lace seems to be a mainstay for Jean-Claude, and you have to wonder why. I have a lovely lace tablecloth, hand-crafted a hundred years ago. It takes constant maintenance to keep it nice. It yellows even in a darkened drawer and can gather stains from food eaten in a different zip code. As clothing, lace scratches and gets caught on nearly everything. But at least with white lace, skin pallor isn’t so noticeable, so that’s something. Either vampires are the ultimate clotheshorses with a lot of money to update their wardrobes, or they use a lot of vampire illusion magic to keep people from noticing the untidy dark dots that stubbornly remain after washing.

  Of course, in the early days, before Addison v. Clark, I’m sure vampires simply took what they needed or wanted to make life comfortable. But after legality, life must have become more difficult. I found it interesting, as an admittedly amateur student of economics, how many of the undead in Anita’s world are employed, and what that might mean for the economy in that alternate reality. Jean-Claude owns a string of businesses. He even has a corporate jet. But I suppose if undead isn’t really dead in the eyes of the law, lots of things vampires thought they’d escaped probably came back to haunt them. The owner of the abandoned house at the edge of town where you’d hidden your coffin is not only no longer afraid, he’s now charging rent. Even the grave can’t get you away from that blasted alimony ruling, and no doubt the credit card companies had a field day in court!

  Anita herself fights for the rights of zombies, to keep them from being abused by unscrupulous business owners looking to save a buck on payroll. But surely zombies in the kitchen and vampires working the night shift must have lowered the employment possibilities for new graduates. And are people who die at age fifty-nine and come back as vampires exempt from mandatory retirement? Does the Americans with Disabilities Act apply? Are the living the new disabled in Anita’s world? Is showing up for a job interview with a rosy complexion now a detriment? Stock up on that pale make-up, kids! You’ll need it to get any use out of that diploma.

  In Anita’s world, make-up to look like a vampire is probably more easily found through L’Oreal or M.A.C. than the local Halloween provider, thanks to Belle Morte’s line of vampires and how they turned the whole concept of what vampires were supposed to look like on its ear. The vampires in Anita’s life, at least, have had “drop-dead gorgeous” applied at a new level.

  Vampires were really the world’s first plastic surgeons. Want to keep your youthful good looks? We have the answer! All nip, no tuck. Never mind the small side effects: the pale, pasty skin, the glowing eyes, the teeth that ruin the thousands spent on braces. You can still show off those perfect abs and chiseled jaw to the girls … and the beaches aren’t as crowded at night.

  Not all vampires are pretty, of course. In Anita’s world, even the average Regular-Joe human can get bumped up to vamp by getting bumped off. Take Willie McCoy, for example. He’s no prize in the looks department. He’s also not tough, nor particularly bright.

  That’s another thing. While getting turned into a vampire by one of Belle Morte’s line can do wonders for you in the looks department, there’s no help for being dumb. Despite their many years on earth as the undead, vampires are surprisingly dim. Maybe it’s the simultaneous death of all those brain cells when they’re turned. Because if a smart vampire bared his teeth at a woman and she continued to walk toward him, looking confident, he should be pulling the ranged arsenal out from under his cloak before she gets one step closer. Anita would have been dead a dozen times over if the vamps she faced had just been smart enough to carry a gun. The world has changed from a thousand, or even a hundred, years ago. It’s perfectly okay for a male vampire, or a shapeshifter, to shoot at the woman intent on ending his existence. A stun grenade will take the starch out of a species-discriminating killer’s smile, and let’s see a lowly human, no matter how well-armed, drive a stake through a vampire’s heart after a clip from an UZI takes off that arm below the elbow. I’m always surprised there aren’t more fanged Edwards in Anita’s world.

  If I were a vampire in Anita’s world, I’d buy a few Kevlar vests with ceramic breastplates. It wouldn’t stop a determined vampire killer forever, but the longer they have to fumble around getting it off, the better the chance the sun will set before they do. I’d also order a special coffin, lined with asbestos shingles—no lungs (well, no working lungs), no lung cancer. Heck, while we’re at it, the lid should be made of solid lead. Vampires are strong, but it would be too heavy for one mere human to lift, and even if that human brought friends, a lead lid might crush their little skulls before they could get their implements of destruction prepared. Kevlar is a good idea for the shifters out there, too—they’ve already proven their effectiveness on police dogs. Buy a Christmas gift from the heart this year: a silver deflecting vest for the werewolf in your life will guarantee he or she will be around to slaver affection on you next full moon.

  Those microchip implants probably wouldn’t be a bad idea either. Instead of the owner’s name, they could list the shifters’ daytime identity and address. And as a bonus, it’d make it a lot easier to keep track of the less than law-abiding. The chicken ranch owner who wakes up to a pile of feathers could use high-tech readers attached to their security systems to identify the werewolf who jumped the fence. Then it’s a simple matter of sending a bill. Maybe a similar system would work for vampires. Bespelling a woman into opening her window so you can suck her dry would lead the police straight to your crypt the next morning. If only humans smartened up!

  Then again, if the vamps and wer
ewolves and humans got smarter, what would we need Anita for? And not having Anita around anymore would be a shame. Looking at Hamilton’s alternate St. Louis through Anita’s eyes uncovers a thousand brilliant bits of comedy gold, from the occasional absurdities of the ardeur to imagining the great and terrible Jean-Claude rolling on the floor savoring the flavor of blackberries through Anita’s tongue. I look forward to a hundred more stories from Ms. Hamilton about Anita’s world—all colored by that special brand of sarcasm that’s made Anita as infamous in her world as she is in our own.

  Cathy Clamp is the USA Today bestselling author of the Sazi shapeshifter series and Thrall Vampire series for Tor Books, along with co-author C. T. Adams. They have also begun to write urban fantasy novels as Cat Adams for Tor with a new vampire/siren series called the Blood Singer debuting in June 2010. She is an avid fan of the Anita Blake reality, as well as pretty much every other urban fantasy series out there. When she’s not writing (or reading), she’s up to her ears in projects with her husband on their small goat farm in the beautiful Texas Hill Country. She can be visited online at http://catadams.net, is happy to visit with fans and friends on Twitter and Myspace as cathyclamp, or is musing at her and C. T.‘s joint blog http://catadamsauthor.blogspot.com.

  Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  That quote is at the heart of the Anita Blake series for me now, but why that quote began to mean so much to me was because I researched the real world for the books. I talked to police, exmilitary, and finally researched serial killers. (The police and the military men and women who were so generous with their time and knowledge, I thank you all. The books would not be what they are without you.)

  I have a close friend whom I met when he was a rookie. He believed he would save the world. He was so bright and shiny and eager. Ten years later I’ve watched the brightness dim and the shiny wear away. I learned through him that you can’t catch all the bad guys, there are too many of them. I learned that after a decade you begin to value going home alive to your family more than any arrest you will make. That saving a life means more than putting a bad guy away, even though you understand that having the bad guy behind bars means he won’t be hunting any more victims.

  Cynical doesn’t begin to cover what he and I have become over the last ten years of friendship. I have been the person he could tell anything to over the years. He was the one who taught me that the greatest gift you can give to the men and women in uniform is to listen. To simply listen, and not show shock, or fear, or Godforbid repulsion. To let them know that you are their quiet pool that they can drop their horror into and know that it won’t come back and bite them, that they can tell you anything and it’s okay. (It helps that I seem to share a cop sense of humor. Dark humor: no one does it better than the police, unless it’s emergency room personnel. But my money is on the cops.) I have had ex-military and police tell me what it feels like to take a human life in the line of duty. Their honesty over the years shaped Anita Blake, shaped my writing, and in the end it shaped me.

  But the research that took the most of whatever innocence I had still lingering was the serial killer research. Knowing that one human being can do that to another forever changed how I look at people. I have learned things I did not want to know. I know now that no matter how horrible my idea is for fiction that real people have already done far worse. That is simple truth. In fact, I have a rule that I never do any violence in my books that can be done without my world’s “magic system,” unless it’s something that is based on a real crime. If some killer has already done it then I can put it in my books, but if it’s something I’ve never heard anyone else really do, I won’t write about it. I won’t feed the real monsters because they don’t need my help. They are creative on their own.

  Think about what I said just now. Anything that’s ever happened in my books that can be done without my preternatural stuff is based on real crime, real things that real people did to other real, live people. That should scare you more than any fiction I will ever write.

  —Laurell

  The Other Side of the Street

  Anita Blake and the Horror Renaissance

  by Alasdair Stuart

  There’s an image that always springs to mind when someone mentions horror to me. It’s the traditional mob of angry villagers making their way up the hill toward Castle McGuffin where the Thing That Should Not Be lives. Sometimes it’s a vampire, sometimes it’s Frankenstein’s Monster, but the mob remain the same. They’re all carrying pitchforks and burning torches, they’re all peasants, they’re all angry, they’re all frightened, and they’re all men.

  From the story of Mary Shelley’s doomed monster down to Doctor Loomis in the Halloween series, it has fallen, time and again, to the male characters to root out evil and horror, to drag it shrieking into the light and, frequently, away from the helpless females it’s been trying to eat, marry, or occasionally both. Horror isn’t just about watching something approach, as William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist, famously said; it’s frequently about watching a man set fire to it or shove a stake through its heart.

  But just as male characters have traditionally hogged the limelight while simultaneously soaking it in blood, female characters have gradually evolved from victims to something much more interesting. It’s a process that began in Dracula, where both Lucy and Mina are extremely cognizant that something is being done to them but lack the knowledge to understand it and, by extension, defend themselves against it. Later on, characters like Laurie Strode and Sydney Prescott, the endlessly troubled heroines of the Halloween and Scream franchises, are gifted with that knowledge, and in Sydney’s case manage to recognize not only their situation but how to manipulate it to their own ends. Over time, it’s become clear that the female characters’ perspective is much more interesting than their male counterparts‘; the men see something unspeakable from a distance, but the women see it up close, and in doing so, inevitably, gain a better understanding of it. It’s this understanding that lies at the heart not only of Anita Blake, but of the impact she’s had on the horror genre as a whole.

  Anita is a new kind of heroine. She has the intellectual and emotional investment of Mina Harker as well as the physical prowess of Buffy Summers, but for the first time she combines them, uses them as tools to understand the world she lives in instead of simply destroying it. In short, while Anita is fully capable of killing monsters, she finds it almost impossible not to understand them. She’s both a monster hunter and a monster, a woman not just working in, but changing, a man’s world. She’s something new and, crucially, something indicative of a major shift in horror as a genre. Up is down, black is white, and the lynch mob may well be monsters themselves.

  Compare Anita to a character like Dolph Storr, the head of the RPIT Unit Anita consults for in the early novels. Dolph is a fascinating character in himself and one who, in a kinder world, would be the hero of his own story. He is a relentlessly effective police officer, a good boss, a husband and father, and as a result is every inch the traditional male hero. He’s a good man in a world that as far as he’s concerned is going to hell, and that only makes him cling to his goodness, to define himself by it even more. He should be, when viewed in these terms, Anita’s rock, her moral compass. Instead, as the novels continue he is pushed further and further to the outskirts of the series, as he finds it more and more difficult to accept the gradual intermingling of the various species—especially when it’s revealed his son Darrin has married a vampire. Anita, in contrast, embraces it. The direct, brash re-animator of Guilty Pleasures is a very different person than the fiercely capable, ruthless necromancer of the later books. As events pull her more and more into contact with the monsters she started off the series investigating, Anita embraces the possibilities for change and growth it offers her.

  Anita is able to do so as effectively as she does for a reaso
n. Her abilities first manifest during her adolescence, the time of life most closely associated with emotional and physical change, and this provides her with the first step toward her adult view of the preternatural, as something which is as commonplace, as familiar as everything else in her life. This subversion of the mundane and use of the normal as a carrier for the supernatural is a recurrent theme throughout Anita’s life and one Hamilton explores with tremendous gusto. Time and again, every element of Anita’s life that could be considered normal—such as a job, friends, and relationships—is driven back to the preternatural, the other, the alien.

  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.