How do I convince Laurell K Hamilton that it’s okay to use “naughty” language that’s also direct?
I know I keep complaining about this for ages, but how can I refrain when the first part of Chapter 25 has Anita noting that in heels, she’s tall enough that she and Richard’s hips are pressed against each other and “the soft mound of his body lay warm and solid against [her].”
Again, that’s his dick, he’s got the beginnings of an erection, and everyone – writer and characters alike – is too old to resort to blurry vagueness around genitals that should be colliding momentarily.
I think my biggest question as I started this segment of Smolder is “are Graham and Anita gonna smash?”.
As we covered last time, the Anitaverse is not kind to characters of color and their characters get assassinated in a way that white male characters usually don’t… unless they (allegedly) represent one of Hamilton’s former loves. Graham is one of those characters that has never felt like he was respected in the narrative. He was a character who was mildly annoying and almost instantly removed from the running for a shot at being one of Anita’s sweeties… and it was frustrating because Graham is not good enough to be a boo but serial rapist and murderer Olaf might be? It’s infuriating.
When we last left Anita, she was busy being all up in her feelings because her pretty pretty dress has triggered her latent mommy/stepmommy/grandmommy issues about her appearance. Obviously, we’re still here in chapter fourteen. Anita is still upset. She’s so upset, actually, that she trips and almost falls in the middle of the street, something that triggers Rodina’s mockery and makes Ru defend her against his sister.
(Which, kind of makes it clear that if Rodina doesn’t get brainwashed… she’s going to die. She can’t live and be that opposite Anita to the point where her brother chooses to defend Anita over her.)
So let’s start with a meaty quote:
“It’s a spike heel on cobblestones, guys, anyone can trip,” I said, but I stayed where Ru had put me with his arm around me and him between us. I let myself put most of my energy into shoveling the emotional shit that I could feel inside my head and body. Emotions didn’t just live in the head, or the heart, they burrowed down into your gut, they poured over your skin, they filled up your eyes, they spilled out your fingertips and toes. Emotions were everywhere if you just let yourself feel them, and I’d worked hard to learn how to feel instead of stuff everything out of sight until it erupted in rage or made terrible choices. I was concentrating so hard on working my issues that I didn’t hear what Rodina said to me.
“I’m sorry, Rodina, what did you say?”
“I said, have you ever seen us trip, any of us?” Rodina asked, peering around her brother at me.
I knew the us meant the Harlequin. “I’ve seen you all mess up in fight training.”
“We can lose, but that’s not the same thing as tripping on a stone. You are so damn mortal, my queen.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know I disappoint you, Rodina, you aren’t winning any prizes with me either.”
“I feel your pain and confusion, and it hurts me that you are so unhappy, but tonight I simply don’t seem to care.”
Anita is so full of emotions and I get it. I get it. But it’s also… she only just told Ru and Rodina that she didn’t care that they were sad about their third sibling’s death because he tried to kill her. So why on earth is she expecting Rodina to ever have empathy for her when she’s made it clear that her empathy won’t be aimed at them ever?
Note: I did use dictation software for part of this so if there any errors well… even with me going through and editing… I am sure I missed the opportunity to correct things.
Returning to the Anitaverse, our convenient witness has gone off to give a formal statement about what she saw and experienced with the vampire on fire. While the young woman does not seem to think anything is amiss, Anita makes it clear in her internal monologue that this is just the first step on analyzing and unpacking whether or not she was responsible for a murder.
One of the things I find really interesting that shows up in this chapter, is the use of texting on the page. Part of this book when Anita texted one of her loved ones, her internal monologue is what carried that information to us. We got the details of the texts but not the words themselves. In this book, in this chapter specifically, we actually see the text messages on page with Anita texting back and forth with Ethan, one of her guards and possibly lovers.
It’s a little thing that isn’t even new — texting on the page is used to convey emotion and narrative without using direct dialogue in a bunch of novels I’ve been reading across the past decade and a popular YA series was built around texting –but it almost gives me hope for Hamilton bringing the series into the 21st century proper. Anita is a character who used a pager well past the point where people used pagers.
I was in high school, having never seen a pager in my life, but Anita was still getting pages to come to the different crime scenes in Saint Louis. Any update is a good update here, because like I said last time one of the big issues with the Anita Blake series for me is that it really lacks a sense of time and place.
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.
Chapter 4 begins with Anita complaining about the stress of her life in the upcoming wedding. it also includes one of the worst sentences I’ve ever read. after Anita talks about walking into the bridal gallery making her feel bad she talks about what had briefly made it okay:
Edward trying on clothes had made it fun again, and seeing Peter be a better adult than some of the immortals I knew, and Asher trying, and Kane getting his ass kicked by Peter. Everything fun was associated with the people, none of it with the bridal shop and clothes.
This is not a good sentence and I don’t want to pretend that it is.
I took a break from sporking/technically hate reading the Anita Blake series after I completed my readthrough of Rafael last year. (You can read that spork here)
I gave myself a year off from engaging with the series on any critical level because I didn’t like how much I was getting annoyed by Hamilton’s writing and her politics in and out of her universe. So I gave myself an ultimatum: no more. No more analysis. No more hate-reading. No more rude tweets backed up with screenshots.
I gave myself a year to calm down, chill out, and see if there’s something else I love to hate(read) more.
There was nothing else and, conveniently, the end of my hiatus landed on the release of Smolder, the latest Anita Blake book.
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