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

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  By the early 1990s, the multiculturalism movement had given rise to the possibility that immigration and racial diversity might be valued as well as feared, and mainstream sensibilities had begun to reject explicit racism and xenophobia, even if both often brewed not far below the surface. It is no surprise then that the vampires of the Anita Blake novels have made similarly great strides in this regard since I Am Legend, so much so that the Supreme Court’s fictional ruling in Addison v. Clarke “gave us a revised version of what life was, and what death wasn’t” (Guilty Pleasures). The upshot of the Court’s decision is that vampirism was legalized in the United States, giving vampires legal status along with certain rights. The extent of those rights was still being debated, but Addison v. Clarke made the murder of vampires illegal without a court order of execution. Immigration of foreign vampires was still regarded as a threat, but both Addison v. Clarke and the vampire suffrage movement signaled a clear growing acceptance of domestic (i.e., American) vampires. As such, Hamilton’s vampires may be monsters, but they are no longer aliens.

  Not surprisingly, given the sociopolitical changes described above, Hamilton’s vampires bear none of the physical markings of their ancestors.7 They are, however, still a racial threat. They are still feared and distrusted, even hated by many (most?) humans, including at first Anita, who quips in Guilty Pleasures, “I don’t date vampires. I kill them,” a sentiment reminiscent of Neville’s previously discussed contempt for human-vampire relationships.

  The Times, They Are a Changing

  What distinguishes the Anita Blake novels from Dracula and I Am Legend is that Hamilton’s novels comprise a long-standing series rather than a single book. At the time of this writing, there are seventeen Anita Blake books, spanning seventeen years. Such a time period allows change, both psychological and political, and Hamilton does not disappoint. The Anita Blake of the later novels is vastly different from the young woman we met in Guilty Pleasures.

  One of the ways in which Anita changes is that she learns to recognize and value some of the vampires’ distinctive characteristics. For example, whereas the vampires’ power to heal was mostly an obstacle she had to overcome in the early novels, by Cerulean Sins she is able to also see its advantages. “One of my favorite things about hanging out with the monsters is the healing,” she says. “Straight humans seemed to get killed on me a lot. Monsters survived. Let’s hear it for the monsters.”

  However, the most telling change in terms of the racial metaphor was in Anita’s attitude toward interpersonal relationships with vampires. In Guilty Pleasures, she was not only unwilling to entertain the possibility of dating Jean-Claude, she didn’t want to have any social relationship with him or any other non-human at all. This early antimiscegenetic attitude was a product of both dislike and fear, with a little disinterest thrown in. “Did I really believe, what was one more dead vampire?” she asks herself in the opening pages of Guilty Pleasures. At that time, her answer to this question is “Maybe.” But hate is neither accidental nor coincidental. “We hate most in others what we fear in ourselves,” muses Anita in Narcissus in Chains. In hercase, what she fears is her own monstrosity, her own power and lust. Anti-miscegenation attitudes can be interpreted the same way: a fear of our own attraction to the racial other.

  Unlike Neville, Anita manages to overcome this initial fear. By Burnt Offerings, she is sleeping with Jean-Claude, albeit with some guilt:

  Good girls do not have premarital sex, especially with the undead… . But here I was, doing it. Me, Anita Blake, turned into coffin bait. Sad, very sad… . You can’t trust anyone who sleeps with the monsters.

  If Anita’s relationship with Jean-Claude was just sexual, it could be characterized as racist, as a sexual objectification of the racial other. But, it clearly becomes much more than that, as evident in the following passage in Blue Moon:

  But I did spare a thought for how that might make my vampire lover feel. His heart didn’t always beat, but it could still break. That’s love. Sometimes it feels good. Sometimes it’s just another way to bleed.

  Although their relationship is by no means monogamous, Anita clearly considers Jean-Claude’s feelings and labels her own emotional response as “love.” Theirs is a relationship driven in part by sexual gratification, but it is not exploitative, not objectifying. Despite the age difference,8 Anita’s growing powers allow her relationship with Jean-Claude (and other non-humans) to be characterized by neither contempt (as when Dracula represents the East European immigrant) nor jealousy (as when Dracula represents the Jew). Unlike the vampire hunters who preceded her, Anita genuinely connects with the racial other. Changing times indeed.

  Under the Surface

  Yet, like in our own world, racial elements do brew underneath the surface and illustrate several problematic aspects of contemporary race relations. For one, there is the troublesome fact that Anita still identifies, in part, as a vampire hunter and consults regularly with the Regional Preternatural Investigation Taskforce (RPIT), a special division of the police department dedicated to protecting humans from non-humans. A police division targeting only the minority segment of the population is reminiscent of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s top-secret Counter Intelligence Program that formally operated between 1956 and 1971. COINTELPRO was originally formed to disrupt the activities of the U.S. Communist Party but is best known for targeting Black nationali t groups ranging from the Black Panthers to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) through illegal surveillance, infiltration, psychological warfare, legal harassment, and illegal force and violence. In the case of radical Black and Puerto Rican activists, COINTELPRO’s actions were so extensive, vicious, and calculated that, according to attorney Brian Glick, they can accurately be termed a form of official “terrorism.” It’s true, of course, that Dolph, Zerbrowski, and the rest of the RPIT squad all operate within the confines of the law, but it is nevertheless telling that the police department, an arm of the government, needs a special division to cope with the vampire threat.

  Another indication of racial tension is the existence of several antivampire groups, such as the League of Human Voters and Humans Against Vampires (HAV), both of which purportedly work within the legal system to agitate against vampire rights. These groups are clear parallels to real-world organizations, such as the Council of Conservative Citizens (which promotes racial segregation and condemns interracial marriage) and VDARE (which advocates reduced immigration).9 A more extreme right-wing racial element is represented in the Anita Blake novels by the KKK-inspired Humans First, a group that originated within Humans Against Vampires but uses violence rather than the legal methods preferred by HAV.

  These parallels are intentionally drawn, but they are too obvious to be intended metaphorically. That is, Hamilton uses a variety of historical and contemporary realities to bring her fictional world to life. Indeed, one of the pleasures of reading the Anita Blake novels is the recognition of our own world, including its geographic landscape, its political structures, and yes, its hate groups. Unlike Stoker and Matheson, who seemed to intend their novels to be read on both literal and metaphorical levels, it is unlikely that Hamilton ever had such an intention. That the metaphor retains its meaning despite that is really a testament to the power of the vampire archetype developed in Dracula and built up over the past 100 years.

  Beyond the Metaphor

  We can, to be sure, step outside the metaphor and examine racial dynamics in the Anita Blake novels on a literal level. Anita of course is White. Sort of. Her mother’s family emigrated from Mexico, but she was raised by her father’s German family after her mother died and, for all practical purposes, she comes across as a typical (in a racial/ethnic sense) White woman.10 Also noteworthy in this regard is that all of Anita’s friends and lovers (human or otherwise) are White, too—this in St. Louis, a city that is over 51 percent African American according to the 2000 Census. 11 There are, to be sure, a handful of non-White characters, including her m
entor Manny Rodriguez,12 but other than Manny, none have prominent roles and only Luther, a human bartender who works the day shift at Dead Dave’s,13 is ever essential to the plot.14 As such, Luther can be seen as the series’ symbolic representation of the racial other, in general, and blackness, in particular. Indeed, unlike other non-White characters, Hamilton takes some extra effort to establish his blackness. In Guilty Pleasures, Luther is not merely Black; he is “a very dark black man, nearly purplish black, like mahogany.” But apart from his Blackness and his friendliness with Anita, we know nothing about Luther’s inner world or even what he does away from work.

  Luther thus may offer a final window into how the Anita Blake novels represent contemporary race relations. White Americans have mostly rejected the explicit racism and anti-Semitism found in Dracula and have mainly turned away from the anti-miscegenation attitudes personified by Robert Neville in I Am Legend. It’s probably not a stretch to say that the majority of White Americans, like their Black counterparts, honestly want a racially just, egalitarian society. No doubt Hamilton falls squarely in this camp. What the character of Luther reminds us is that true racial justice also requires racial intimacy, a deep knowledge and familiarity with those who are not part of the racial in-group.15 Without such familiarity, there is no real recognition and, therefore, no real opportunity to interact as equals. Hamilton clearly gets this, for Anita’s prejudices against vampires waned as she got to know some of them intimately. But it is telling that, in our current racial fabric, many of us 16like Anita, seem to have greater familiarity with vampires than with some of our human neighbors.

  Dr. Mikhail Lyubansky is a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches Psychology of Race and Ethnicity and Theories of Psychotherapy and writes an occasional essay for BenBella. His research interests focus on conditions associated with beliefs about race, ethnicity, and nationality, especially in immigrant and racial minority populations. He writes a weekly blog (Between the Lines) on racial issues for Psychology Today and recently coauthored a book about Russian-Jewish immigration: Building a Diaspora: Russian Jews in Israel, Germany, and the USA. Thanks to this essay, as well as a previous Ben Bella essay on Buffy, his students are now convinced that “he has a thing for vampires.” But, of course!

  It’s only been in the last few years, the last few Anita Blake novels, that I’ve realized why it was almost inevitable that I would write about someone who dealt with death. my mother died when i was six. She was only twenty-nine. My grandmother, her mother, never recovered from her death and I spent my childhood with my grandmother making sure I didn’t forget it either. I loved my mother, but due to my grandmother’s obsession with the tragedy I was never allowed to heal or come to terms with it. Her obsession with the one death would lead eventually to an obsession with death in general, but I’ll talk about that later.

  The first Anita Blake short story, “Those Who Seek Forgiveness,” was all about Anita’s zombie raising abilities, a bereaved wife, and a vengeful zombie. The story would eventually see print in my short story anthology, Strange Candy. The cemetery that I set the story in was the cemetery that my mother is buried in, because when I sat down to write the story and needed a place to set it I knew that graveyard. I knew it well, because my grandmother saw the treatment of the gravesite as a testament to her love for my mother. I remember cleaning out the carvings on the tombstone with a toothbrush when I was a child. We planted flowers, and every holiday had its grave decoration. I didn’t think about why that first Anita story was set there, other than convenience. I mean, what other cemetery did I know as well as that one? It was simply logical. But my interest in the dead wasn’t just about dead relatives. I was raised on real-life ghost stories, from experiences that my older relatives had had with a haunted house they lived in when my aunts and uncles were little to a graveyard story that was right out of The Twilight Zone. My grandmother told the stories as gospel. Ghosts were real; that was just the truth. No topic of death or mayhem was considered too harsh for me as a child. I never remember my grandmother protecting me from anything in that vein. She did consider it too much to discuss money with me until I was fifteen or sixteen, but not death. Death, abuse, mental illness, and everything else were fair game. Okay, money and sex were not talked about, but violence was cool as a topic. Again, it seems inevitable that I’d write about a character who embraces violence so freely, but not sex. You can leave your child- hood behind but it leaves a mark, one that usually scars.

  I’m told by my aunts and uncles that my grandmother, their mother, was more cheerful when she was younger, but I missed that part of her life. I got her when she was morbid, and a very dark personality. The glass wasn’t just half empty, it was a cracked, dirty glass and wasn’t there something floating in the bottom? I inherited that dark outlook, but have worked for years to be the most optimistic pessimist I know.

  But let me leave you with my grandmother’s obsession with death. I said it grew to encompass more than just my mother’s death. Grandmother got the gifts that most grandmothers get, like WhitmanSampler boxes of chocolate. She had two that hadn’t contained chocolate in years, but she kept them and filled them with obituaries. Not ones of friends or family, though those might be in there. She collected obits that were particularly pitiful, or tragic in some way. Then when I visited she would get them out and read them to me, or try to get me to read them, because they were sad or horrible. this is the woman who raised me. so is it any wonder that I grew up to write books about a necromancer who gains power through death?

  Laurell

  Death Becomes Her

  The Role of Anita’s Necromancy

  by Sharon Ashwood

  You’d think being the Executioner would be enough to warn the vampires off, but in the very first scene of Guilty Pleasures, Willie McCoy is sitting in Anita’s office asking for help. Apparently the undead are slow to take a hint.

  Anita ends the conversation by falling back on police protocol and her own personal rules. Anita doesn’t work for vampires, she kills them. Period.

  It’s a good thing Anita has a code, because she’s about to progress down a nasty-looking path. Over the course of the books, the obstacles Anita encounters force her to up the ante—whether in terms of magic or her tolerance for violence to cope with whatever emergency is at hand. Those crises are usually bloody. Each time she pushes those boundaries, she looks more like the monsters she’s fighting, whether they’re human or preternatural. Eventually the niceties of conventional morality start falling away. By Obsidian Butterfly she’s nearly level with Edward in the stone-cold-killer sweepstakes and has

  more monsters at her beck and call than a D-movie film director. So why doesn’t all that power—both magical and plain old Edwardesque violence—push Anita wholly to the dark side? What’s stopping her from becoming the high priestess of lustful evil that Dolph seems to fear? The answer lies in who—and also what— Anita is.

  Fun with Zombies

  Anita does not begin life as an average, happy-go-lucky, white-bread kid—or at least she doesn’t stay that way for long. Anita’s mother—a first death that never quite gets laid to rest—bequeathed both dark beauty and exotic power to a daughter marooned in a blond, WASP, suburban household. This sets Anita apart from “regular people” from the very beginning. That and, um, accidentally raising corpses from time to time—a fact her father ignores and her stepmother, Judith, deplores. “I won’t go into details,” Anita relates, “but does the term ‘road kill’ have any significance for you? It did for Judith. I looked like a nightmare version of the Pied Piper” (The Laughing Corpse).

  If there was any question in young Anita’s mind that her preternatural powers were morally suspect, that doubt is quickly confirmed. Early on, her father takes her to see her Grandmother Flores, a Vaudun priestess, to help her control her talents. Grandma’s response is that it’s “hard to be Vaudun and a necromancer and not be evil” (The
Laughing Corpse). Then, just to iron in the family neurosis, Anita is cut off from her mother’s kin for the good of her soul.

  The “zombie queen” stigma was bound to leave a mark. There is no sense of freedom or self-abandonment in Anita. She enters adulthood with a fierce need for internal control that at times borders on repression. A church-goer, she doesn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. She cringes at the idea of Catherine’s bachelorette party and doesn’t like the idea of being a bridesmaid any better. She doesn’t dance in public and, even twelve books later in Incubus Dreams, only agrees to do so at Larry’s wedding under duress. She’s obviously more comfortable with guns than her feminine side and hates showing anything resembling vulnerability or weakness. Notably, after a disastrous college affair, she has no appetite to risk that kind of rejection again. Until well into the series, Anita sleeps alone.

  These uncompromising aspects of her character are significant, because her self-control is often what is challenged. Even more important: it’s her softer side she’s trying to protect by repressing, the one that does nurture and love; that’s often her saving grace.

  She makes one large compromise, and that’s her profession. Anita learned early on that she has to use her animating ability or it will use itself, raising the dead at random. So, unable to reject her talents entirely, Anita becomes an animator but takes a carefully ethical path. She’s a pain in her boss’s rear end, but a straight-shooter with the clients and their deceased. Despite her abilities, she dislikes animators who abuse or exploit the dead and enlists Irving’s help to push for zombie-rights legislation. At the start of Guilty Pleasures, the Anita we meet has already laid the foundation for her future role in the preternatural community. The dead are a key part of her life and she treats them well—as long as they’re behaving themselves.