If you are new to Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, this is not the place to start. Jason is a novella ostensibly concerning one of Anita’s closest friends and his girlfriend. Really it’s just an excuse for a chapters-long orgy scene. If you are a veteran reader of the series, do yourself a favor and leave it be unless you enjoy reading gratuitous, not particularly sexy, sex scenes. The best thing that can be said about Jason is that it was less than $5.
It’s a shame, really. A whole book review summed up into one, not very long paragraph. Since this piece needs to be longer than that let me add this: The early novels in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series are some of my favorites in the vampire genre. More hard-boiled mystery than anything else, somewhere along the line they became all about her relationships and sexual escapades.
I realize that I’m part of the problem – I keep buying and reading them, even though they aren’t what I wish they were. I DO appreciate the fact that she is preaching acceptance of non-heteronormative lifestyles, and acceptance of all regardless of creed, color, or nationality. I just wish those same lessons were couched in her earlier, much better written works, like Circus of the Damned.
Are there any other Anita Blake readers out there? What do you think about the quality of the more recent works versus the originals? Please leave a comment below – I’d love to hear what other people think about this.
I adored the Anita Blake books for a long time but had to give them up around Blood Noir. I contemplate going back every once in a while and catching up, but every time I do, I come across a review like yours that convinces me not to.
I’m afraid you’re making the right choice. I was able to break my Charlaine Harris and Janet Evanovich habits. I just wish I could do the same here.
Lol, I’m still clinging to Janet Evanovich, so we all have our weaknesses!
I loved the early Anita Blake books. I read through Danse Macabre, even though the series started going down hill rapidly with Obsidian Butterfly. I could go no further, as The Harlequin was absolutely unreadable. It’s not the smut that turned me off, though I found it overwrought, too lengthy, and disappointingly unsexy, but rather the fact that Anita seemed to forget that she had a job – or forget to do the job – or be anything else besides the sex partner of increasingly disposable characters. Well, that and the fact that Hamilton shat on her own canon by changing the origins of more than one character, as if she couldn’t be bothered to remember or reread what she’d written about them.
I’ve wondered if she’s actually even writing them anymore… The tone of the first 6 or 7 is so different.