Author: Laurell K Hamilton
ISBN: 978-075-535257-9
RRP: $32.99
I know I’ve said this before but this time I really don’t know where to start. To say that its not what I was expecting is the understatement of the millennium. When I think Vampire Hunter I think something in the vein of Abraham Van Helsing from Dracula. I definitely do not think of a woman who can only be called a psychic vampire, feeding her power through sex and anger, with a harem of vampires and wereanimals who all share her bed and her affections.
Bullet is the latest installment of the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series. It can be read alone but a lot of the back story and set up would have come earlier in the series. Having said that you will enjoy this novel even if you are starting the series at the same point I am, about 15 books in.
We meet Anita Blake in the most mundane of circumstances – for a vampire executioner and U.S Marshal – at a kids dance recital trying to lead a normal life. As you can imagine, the normal life bit doesn’t last long when you think of her occupation. We don’t see much of the U.S. Marshal or the vampire executioner side of Anita in Bullet. Here we see more of the psychic vampire feeding off the power of sex and anger, growing her harem and gaining control of more wereanimal groups to help in the fight ahead.
Set in a modern world where vampires and lycanthropes have become an accepted part of society, with Master Vampires in all major cities and laws to protect the underlings of a Master gone haywire, the Anita Blake series brings together all manner of wereanimals with vampires that follow a lot of the early myths as well as the more modern romanticised vampires.
The Mother of All Darkness is trying to make a comeback, after everyone thought she died in an explosion, so the vampires and the wereanimals need to be united to fight. The easiest way to unite them is to bring them under Blake’s control, and the easiest way to do that is to get their animals to connect – through sex. Anita Blake is not a lycanthrope in the historical sense, she doesn’t actually shape shift, what she does is have an inner animal and for every wereanimal she’s been attacked by she’s gained that inner animal. This leaves her in the position of being the only one able to connect with all of the different wereanimals and to make them ‘hers’.
But it’s not all mating and group sex – though there is a lot of it. Almost as much of the book is fighting for dominance, blood, death and feeding.
If you like a lot of sex mixed in with your fangs and blood then this is the series for you, as long as it’s not the flowery romance and light of Twilight you’re after. If you begin your Anita Blake affair with Bullet I can guarantee you will want to go back and find the earlier books so that you catch up on all of the back stories.
I devour books, vampires and supernatural creatures are my genre of choice but over the past couple of years, I have broadened my horizons considerably. In a nutshell – I love to write! I love interacting with a diverse range of artists to bring you interviews. Perhaps we were perfect before – I LOVE WORDS!