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sultry stuff
Tuesday, 9 March 2010 03:21 pmCape Town has been ridiculously, absurdly, stinkingly hot, and yesterday was a complete killer, certainly the worst this hot season. It was made worse by the fact that in the heat of the afternoon I had to do a run to the Motor Neurone Disease Association to drop off the wheelchair and walker my dad had been using. The Association is a truly wonderful group of people who offer support and services to MND sufferers and their families, and we wouldn't really have been able to deal with all this without them. But the errand made me realise quite how much I loathed and detested that bloody wheelchair - a great, ungainly, difficult creature, hard to steer and tricky to collapse and reassemble when transporting it. It was a necessary thing and allowed my dad to get around, but I swear the wretched machine was possessed of an imp of perversity.
The combination of the heat and my last tussle with the Wheelchair of Intractability left me a bit shaken and twitching, so I wandered into the air-conditioned calm of the bargain book place in Pinelands, and browsed for half an hour. Result: two cookbooks, a clutch of Philip K. Dick, and Guilty Pleasures, the first of Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake novels. (These last two make interesting bedfellows. For a value of "interesting" involving, I suspect, bad sex on mind-bending drugs).
Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series is one of the long-term success stories of the madly-burgeoning paranormal romance/urban fantasy category: Anita Blake is a modern-day vampire hunter and "animist", i.e. she raises the dead. (And lowers them, too.) I really had very low expectations of this series, since The Word On The Net has been that while many people adore the books they quickly degenerate into gratuitous supernatural sex. This is, however, apparently worse in the later books (there are almost twenty of the things) and I was interested to see what the first one was like - not least because I'm about to embark on my vampire lecture series again, and I get a bit completist about vampire texts. (If a student references a vampire text I haven't read/watched, there is Serious Shame.)
Um. It was actually fairly dreadful. The character is interesting, but unrealistic, the world likewise, and the whole is not well written. It was fascinating to see the parallels with Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse novels, since both deal with a world in which vampires have Come Out and are an accepted part of society and a source of major sexual fascination. Harris's first book was in 2001, Hamilton's in 1993, so one cannot acquit Harris of influence, but the truth is her treatment of the same basic premise is infinitely more accomplished. Above all I have to say that Hamilton's simple control of narrative and plot are severely lacking - the story is bitty, floundering and strangely unfocused. The sexual elements are also considerably more perverse while being, to my mind, infinitely less convincing. I wasn't gripped and I certainly wasn't titillated. In fact, phooey. Despite Hamilton's attempt at a get-out-of-jail-free quality pass in the book's title it's the Sookie novels I have read and re-read as a definite and unabashed guilty pleasure, and the whole set of which I own. I won't be going back to Anita Blake.
On the other hand, I'm sinusy and, cooler temperatures today notwithstanding, heatstressed, and have a horrible headache. Maybe I should have read Anita Blake in winter. But maybe it wouldn't make a difference.
The combination of the heat and my last tussle with the Wheelchair of Intractability left me a bit shaken and twitching, so I wandered into the air-conditioned calm of the bargain book place in Pinelands, and browsed for half an hour. Result: two cookbooks, a clutch of Philip K. Dick, and Guilty Pleasures, the first of Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake novels. (These last two make interesting bedfellows. For a value of "interesting" involving, I suspect, bad sex on mind-bending drugs).
Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series is one of the long-term success stories of the madly-burgeoning paranormal romance/urban fantasy category: Anita Blake is a modern-day vampire hunter and "animist", i.e. she raises the dead. (And lowers them, too.) I really had very low expectations of this series, since The Word On The Net has been that while many people adore the books they quickly degenerate into gratuitous supernatural sex. This is, however, apparently worse in the later books (there are almost twenty of the things) and I was interested to see what the first one was like - not least because I'm about to embark on my vampire lecture series again, and I get a bit completist about vampire texts. (If a student references a vampire text I haven't read/watched, there is Serious Shame.)
Um. It was actually fairly dreadful. The character is interesting, but unrealistic, the world likewise, and the whole is not well written. It was fascinating to see the parallels with Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse novels, since both deal with a world in which vampires have Come Out and are an accepted part of society and a source of major sexual fascination. Harris's first book was in 2001, Hamilton's in 1993, so one cannot acquit Harris of influence, but the truth is her treatment of the same basic premise is infinitely more accomplished. Above all I have to say that Hamilton's simple control of narrative and plot are severely lacking - the story is bitty, floundering and strangely unfocused. The sexual elements are also considerably more perverse while being, to my mind, infinitely less convincing. I wasn't gripped and I certainly wasn't titillated. In fact, phooey. Despite Hamilton's attempt at a get-out-of-jail-free quality pass in the book's title it's the Sookie novels I have read and re-read as a definite and unabashed guilty pleasure, and the whole set of which I own. I won't be going back to Anita Blake.
On the other hand, I'm sinusy and, cooler temperatures today notwithstanding, heatstressed, and have a horrible headache. Maybe I should have read Anita Blake in winter. But maybe it wouldn't make a difference.
