Incubus Dreams

In this twelfth installment of the Anita Blake series, the heroine again addresses the challenge of juggling a career as a vampire hunter, love affairs with supernatural creatures, and continued pressure from the human community to conform. While Hamilton's multigenre story is still compelling, she sadly relies too heavily on her now-stock scenes as a backdrop for gratuitous erotic encounters. Cynthia Holloway, however, infuses the first-person narrative with the spunk and sass that Anita fans have come to expect. Her performance brings to mind conspiratorial gossip sessions with old friends, a style that works beautifully with the heroine's thoughts but becomes jarring when the other characters recount moments of gruesome seriousness. Nevertheless, Holloway brings coherence and character to a book that is otherwise bereft of both. A.A. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine


Anita Blake, vampire hunter, is back. In this adventure, a vampire serial killer is murdering strippers, and Anita is called in to assist police with the investigation. As Anita juggles lovers and relationships, frequent coupling refuels her "power triumvirates," which are in need of constant attention. Cynthia Holloway's performance captures an insouciant, wisecracking Anita, whose libido is her principal motivation. However, Holloway uses the same sassy bad-girl tones that work well in early scenes for the overly long, steamy sex scenes, and that "attitude" misses the mark. Laurell K. Hamilton's twelfth visit to the vampiric/lycanthropic wilds of St.Louis is ponderous to the point of tedious, and desperately in need of a good edit. Even so, Hamilton's fans will clamor for more. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

September 13, 2004
Fans of bestseller Hamilton's vampire hunter Anita Blake will be thrilled with at least one aspect of this transitional 12th installment (after 2003's Cerulean Sins
): Anita finally resolves her relationships with werewolf ex-boyfriend Richard Zeeman and vampire boyfriend Jean-Claude. They'll also be pleased to see Anita finally get comfortable with her own behavior, despite crossing many lines—sexual, psychological, professional, paranormal—that she previously thought uncrossable. In her role as vampire-executioner and preternatural-crime investigator, Anita pursues a band of serial-killing vampires who prey on female strippers, but much of the novel focuses on her responsibilities as a leader in St. Louis's vampiric-lycanthropic community. Those obligations are often intertwined with sex, the basic tool of her ever-growing magical powers. The ardeur
that compels her to have sex in order to fuel her two "power triumvirates" must now be fed with increasing frequency. Old foes threaten as new enemies emerge. There's plenty of life (and undeath) left in this series, and Hamilton's imagination is apparently as inexhaustible as her heroine's supernatural capacity for coupling. Agent, Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House. (Oct. 5)

Forecast:
The trend toward emphasizing the erotic may lose some established fans, but is likely to gain the author many more new readers. A 14-city author tour will help keep the momentum going.