We’ve returned to Smolder a month later (for me) and we’re doing a little less in the way of chapters because I had a lot to say about chapter eight and the other two chapters were short. 

Last time, we got the realization that Anita is being shaped to be shipped with Edward and his barely legal stepson Peter – though thankfully not at the same time. We also got the start of a casefic with what appears to be anti-vampire hate crimes converging on St. Louis, Missouri just in time for Anita’s upcoming wedding and the reminder that the US government is never ever good if a piece of fiction is even remotely honest with itself. That’s where we last left off, in fact.

“I decided to be cranky when I saw how small the manager’s office was; there would barely be room for Dolph’s and McKinnon’s shoulders, let alone the manager and me. I smiled and told him, “We’ll be right back.” Then I motioned Dolph and McKinnon down the hallway so we wouldn’t be overheard.

“What’s up, Anita?” Dolph asked.

“The room is tiny. I don’t want to be in that tight a space with McKinnon’s charm.”

“McKinnon’s charm” is the magical tool that he thought would protect him from Anita and Jean-Claude’s vampire powers… but just set off said powers and almost harmed Anita. It’s the one that made me suspect the trajectory of the series as it goes on. 

We then get this infodump about how one of the main experts that the government think tank committee tapped to work on the project is Gerarld Mallory, a vampire hunter with an attitude towards vamps that Anita compares to“racism” back in Hit List when talking to Laila Karlton:

“I’ve seen him kill. He gets off on it. He’s like a racist who has permission to hate and kill.”

“You say race because I’m black.”

“No, I say racist because it’s the closest thing I can imagine to his attitude toward vampires. I’m not joking when I say after seeing him stake vampires that he scares me. He hates them so much, Karlton. He hates them without reason, or thought, or any room in his mind for a reason not to hate them. It consumes him, and people consumed by hate are crazy. It blinds them to the truth, and makes them hate anyone who doesn’t agree with them.”

(I talked about that and other tropes back in 2017.)

The thought is that Gerald is so racist against vampires (and maybe shapeshifters) that he cannot be trusted to be objective about anything related to them. He also, as Anita points out, “hasn’t done anything but morgue stakings in decades” so it’s been decades since he’s fought a vampire that they apparently do not understand that vampires are so much faster and stronger than humans. (“I don’t trust you as much as I did before, but skip it, let’s get back to the fact that you are part of a government think tank committee and you all think that vampires are not faster and stronger than human normal. How the hell did the experts on your panel decide that bit of misinformation?”)

So when working with a team to create a charm to protect humans from vampire powers, what he’s actually doing is giving bad and biased information that will get people and vampires killed. 

This sparks a conversation about how Gerald and the government folks he’s working with are prejudiced against vampires and that they all think “the only good vampire is a dead vampire”. Then, McKinnon is all “well we wouldn’t take advice from anyone who thought that” which is hilarious if you know anything about the history of the US government’s thinktanks being loaded up with bigots and how bigots mask their beliefs as something else, something “less harmful” in order to poison the well we’re supposed to be drinking out of. 

Anita actually does compare Gerald to a racist again, by the way, something I always find funny and frustrating considering the way race plays out in the Anitaverse and how racism works in urban fantasy often. 

“If it’s Gerald Mallory, then he’d do anything to change the laws back to the bad old days when vampires could be killed on sight. He hates them with the kind of hate you see in hardcore white supremacists, or men who despise women at the same time that they’re obsessed with them. It’s that kind of obsessive hatred that I saw in Mallory the last time I worked with him.”

First of all, what would Anita type as a “softcore” white supremacist? 

Second of all, the second thing she wants to compare Gerald to is a misogynist… but he’s also that? Considering that she then goes on to tell the men in the room what it is that Gerald has told her he thinks of her:

“He thinks I’m sleeping with the enemy, and that Jean-Claude basically used vampire wiles to seduce me and that I’m not in love with him, I’m just mind-fucked or possessed, or I’ve gone completely over to the other side because he found out I’m a necromancer and that makes me as evil as a vampire.”

“He did not say that to you,” McKinnon said.

“No, he called me fucking coffin bait, fucking fur-banger, whore of Babylon, and an evil slut who betrayed my humanity to be in league with the devil.”

“Did he call you all that in front of witnesses?” Dolph asked.

“Not unless you count the vampire that he was trying to kill, and that was so long ago that the vampire was just glad to live through it all. No way was he going to testify against a vampire hunter, and back then no one would have believed him anyway.”

“How long ago was that?” McKinnon asked.

“God, eight, nine years ago now. I haven’t been invited back to Washington, DC, since then, at least not to hunt vampires.”

“You went to DC to speak in front of two committees. One on zombie rights and one on vampire rights,” Dolph said.

“Yeah, the first one went pretty well, but by the time I was invited to speak about vampires the antivampire lobby had blackened my name so that they decided not to have me speak after all.”

There’s a lot going on here but let’s start with “this man is so messed up that he told Anita to her face that she was a fangbanger who’d betrayed humanity but not even because she wanted to but because she got mind-rolled by a pretty vamp”. He doesn’t even respect her enough to view her supposed betrayal of humanity as a conscious decision for some undead d. And he’s saying this in front of her face so chances are? He’s saying it in other places too. Because that’s how assholes work!

Next, let’s talk about how the worldbuilding and wonky timeline in Anita Blake makes it difficult to understand when anything happened. Anita says that she spoke about “zombie rights” – and I find that complicated because unlike vampires, zombies aren’t human and a minority of the minority of animators or necromancers have the ability to imbue them with humanity after death – and “vampire rights” (pin in that for the future, I swear) “eight, nine years ago”.

This would’ve been before most if not all of the series. Which would put it in the early Nineties when Anita was first being written. The thing is, with Hamilton having to stretch her timeline to account for the fact that it’s been thirty years of writing this and Anita is now barely thirty-five (if she is even that), eight, nine years ago is… 2015, 2014. The political landscape of the US was definitely different in ways that are difficult to explain but it makes sense to have a “zombie rights” committee in 199X as opposed to 201X? 

It’s kind of like how every time you write a new Bruce Wayne origin story, you have to choose whether you’re going to leave him growing up as a child in a 1920s inspired sci-fi art deco crime fest or… if you’re going to yeet him through the timestream and tell stories with him in the modern era, updating the older stories all the while when they’re referenced. (When referencing a story that used an archaic form of tech we’ve streamlined in modernity, use the modern form of the thing.) 

Hamilton is writing a novel series, of course, and there’s no way for her to have predicted that she’d still be writing this series thirty years later. It makes sense that her tech and timelines are both off. However, as I read this series, I really continue to get this sense that the Anita Blake series is adrift without a sense of time and place.

Yes, it’s set in St. Louis, MO… but almost all of the landmarks and neighborhoods she references are related to her vampires and shifters. When it comes to time, Anita feels displaced but not in the same way that Captain America did. She is simultaneously twenty three and thirty three, a waif and a wo-wo-woman. Anita is old enough to remember events that happened when I was a child in the early nineties… and she is also sleeping with a high schooler and no one can ping the fact that she’s significantly older than him. 

Anyway, I also want to talk about the politics of the Anitaverse. Or rather, the politics of the US government in the Anitaverse.

The US in this series is a country where at the point of reading there are still portions of the countries where bounty hunters like Edward and his crew can get paid to hunt and kill shifters for a variety of reasons – for example, if you shoplift and are a vampire or a shapeshifter… your punishment is going to be a lot more permanent than a normal human being’s would be in a court of law because they will just argue for your execution.

So we know that in the Anitaverse, despite Hamilton’s best attempts to pretend otherwise, All Cops Are Bad. (And her best attempts remain laughable because her cops be doing Some Bad Shit on the regular even before you get to Anita’s crimes against humanity…)

But yes, the idea that vampires and shifters (and other supernatural beings, I’m sure) have their rights up for grabs just as much as Black/brown people, queer people, and trans people do always has made my brain itch in a bad way with these series. 

Especially because of how Hamilton continues to position the human rights violations happening to supernatural beings as directly paralleling what happens to real minorities in the country… which ignores that vampires and shifters in the Anitaverse are often queer and some are brown.

(We’ve counted exactly how many named Black characters are in the series before and I think the only trans character is the werehyena Narcissus who is trans and intersex… and has never been written non-offensively)

It also, as we’ve covered, ignores that while yes shifters and vampires are people too… the average human being can’t rip the arms off of a person and then beat a different person to death with them?

Queer people and people of color are deemed dangerous by society that needs a reason to terminate us sans guilt… but in the Anitaverse, it’s clear that supernatural beings are dangerous even when they don’t mean to be?? Part of Micah’s entire job with the “Furry Coalition” is talking shifters down who’ve lost control because they’re overcome by emotion or they’ve found an alcoholic beverage that works on them. And they’re about to turn wherever they’re at into a bloodbath. 

You can’t just… make that existence analogous to that of actual minorities because… that’s not how that works!

Anyway, chapter eight doesn’t really raise plot questions for me but it does make me want to revisit my own urban fantasy series plans…

It ends with a more explicit “hey the US government is trying to get to Jean-Claude and Anita” thing with Dolph and Anita sharing suspicions just before McKinnon comes back from putting the charm in his car. That relationship is dead in the water, by the way, with Anita noting that, “I would be friendly with McKinnon, but we weren’t friends anymore”.

And for once? I don’t blame her.

Chapter nine is… a little valuable than I expected? On first skim, because it opens with Anita complaining about how small the manager’s office was (the second time in the two chapters), I was prepared to write it off entirely because who on earth is going to stop me from sporking?

But we get some more details about the situation like the fact that our handy witness Mona had apparently sensed/smelled smoke before the fire alarm went off, how many people were outside still or at dinner so it wasn’t a situation with the sunrise flameup in New York. Oh and how about the weird thing where Mona said that she was afraid that the vampire would catch fire again – even after she closed the blinds and curtains. There’s something so weird happening here and I want to know what’s going on!

So does Anita, thank god, so hopefully we get some investigating in the next short chapter.

Chapter ten is a very brief 262 words. I could paste the entire thing here and it wouldn’t add much to my wordcount. I could also manage to write twice as much about the chapter than exists in the dang book… 

But I won’t.

This time.

McKinnon makes the obvious point that no human would smell smoke through a hotel room door and down the hallway before the smoke detector went off. Anita follows that up by specifically suggesting that a wererat would be able to sniff out that trace of smoke, because rats apparently have a really good sense of smell. 

After a moment, they basically come to their conclusions:

“Are we all thinking she opened the drapes and then waited to put out the fire so there was no loss of life other than the victim?” Dolph asked.

McKinnon and I exchanged a look, then turned back to Dolph. I said, “Yes.” McKinnon said, “We are.”

“Let’s go talk to our hero,” Dolph said.

I’ve read some spoilers for the next book so I’m actually not sure if Mona is the murderer or if she facilitated the murderer’s actions, but like… honestly excited to see Anita doing things and using her brain. 

Now, before we dip for another month, I want to talk about… hate crimes. 

Yes, I think Hamilton’s grasp of oppression and identity is concerning (wait until book #30 comes out and we get the, and I shit you not, race-swapping vampire), but I’m also just fascinated with the way that people who are bad at this stuff then write about (largely white) supernatural characters experiencing some of the worst possible things that a minority can experience.

Across the Anitaverse vampires are the creatures most likely to be hatecrimed. There are at least two anti-vampire groups that are gunning for them (and one is a full on Humans First/Make America Human Again type group). One of the groups (and I can’t remember which one even though they have come up in this spork already) actively espouses violence against vampires. To them, vampires aren’t people so they can do whatever they want as long as humans (who aren’t allies) aren’t harmed. 

It says a lot that out of all the different vampire rights conversations that come up but the only thing I can actually remember is that it’s only barely illegal to hatecrime a vampire. But hey, they can vote for president, now! (Also, for sure Charlaine Harris and the True Blood team beyond her novels absolutely saw what Hamilton was doing with the hate crimes against vampires and amped that up a ton because Hamilton, up until now, mostly talks about crimes other people have witnessed whereas Harris’s vampires are actively being hatecrimed always, I feel? Don’t correct me if I’m wrong though!)

Also, it’s not that I want Hamilton to come up with slurs for vampires… but also? I kinda wish she’d been creative and came up with one just because it would be entertaining for me. She has slurs for if you’re sleeping with a vampire or a shapeshifter but not if you are a vampire… or shapeshifter. Boo! Boring!

See y’all next month when we return to the scene of the crime and find out if Mona the Convenient Witness is an anti-vampire bigot or if she’s been controlled/coerced into unaliving the undead!