Club Vampyre

I had originally read each of these collected novels separately, and was tickled to find a SFBC book collecting them into a single novel. I am a fan of Anita Blake from the early, mystery and adventure laden novels, all the way up to the mystery and adventure heavily laced with odd vampire politics and a couple hundred pages of kinky sex. This purchase allowed me to finish my hardback collection of the series. Long live the vampiric smut that is Anita Blake.

I love strong women and that is Anita Blake to a tee. Hamilton writes a very good vampire hunter novel. Anita is a person really all alone in the world. She tries very hard to stick to her own code. Don't try me and I will not kill you.

This is a great paranormal series. If you like reading stories about the paranormal, it is well worth the read. This are considered romance, but it doesn't get risky until a few books in.

Many fans of Anita Blake are not happy with the recent direction Laurell K. Hamilton has gone with her novels, but that does not take away from the fact that when she sets her mind to it Hamilton can come up with grand finales for her horror stories that Stephen King and Clive Barker should be jealous about. To evidence that claim the first three Anita Blake novels are collected in this hardcover volume, "Club Vampyre." Read these three and you are not going to want to stop, and while you might abandon the series before it reaches double figures you are still going to appreciate these initial volumes. "Guilty Pleasures" is the first Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novel and the main thing you need to know about our heroine is that for all intents and purposes her Vampire Hunter days are over. When we are introduced to Anita she is well into her career an Animator, where she raises the dead, which is a fairly profitable occupation in this alternative America. In fact, Anita Blake is not so much killing vampires in this first novel as she is trying to avoid dating one. That would be Jean-Claude, the master vampire, who has put his first two marks upon Anita, which links them psychically and makes her somewhat immune to the mental powers of the vampires. Obviously this will have long-term repercussions in the series, but at this point we are hungry for more of the character's backstory and how she earned her reputation as "The Executioner." We also learn the rules of the game in terms of vampires and this brave new world they inhabit, while also being caught up in the story that the thousand-year-old Master Vampire of St. Louis wants to hire Anita to solve the sudden rash of vampire murders. The world of Anita Blake is one in which the Supreme Court has granted the undead equal rights, so that you cannot kill a vampire without a warrant and you can just imagine the legal morass involving zombies, ghouls and were-beasts. Hamilton has created a world in which the undead are still creatures of the night but have become a part of society, which runs the spectrum from vampire strip clubs such as the Guilty Pleasures of the title to the Church of Eternal Life where becoming a vampire can help you achieve that particular goal. Anita Blake is not a two-dimension character, which is why once you read "Guilty Pleasures" you have to move on to the next story. Fortunately with this volume all you have to do is turn the page. In "The Laughing Corpse" focus is still on Anita's job as an Animator. Once again the title is taken from the name of a St. Louis hangout for those who like to visit the dark side, in this case a comedy club (helpful hint: zombies do not like to be the butt of jokes). This time around Anita is in way over her head with a whole bunch of serious problems. A lord of the underworld wants to pay her big time bucks to raise someone who has been dead for a couple of hundred years and does not like it that Anita has refused because the