Danse Macabre (Anita Blake #14) by Laurell K Hamilton
Anita has missed her period. That’s more than enough drama considering the possible fathers, bickering from Richard and the various birth defects that vampires and shapeshifters can have.
But that is eclipsed by another problem – Jean-Claude is holding a grand meet up of Master Vampires to watch the ballet. Masters of the City are gathering in the city, including several of Jean-Claude’s old friends. So many Masters together is bound to be a source of drama – each with their own hidden ulterior motives to navigate. And Anita’s powers – her Beasts, the Ardeur – are eternally unpredictable leading to a whole new level of problems
This book has a pattern. Woo-woo happens: Anita’s the beasts rise, the ardeur does it’s ardeury thing, Belle Morte drops in to cause trouble because she really really needs a hobby, the Mother of all Darkness looms into vision and is all spooky but doesn’t really do anything. They deal with the woo-woo, this usually involves sex or pseudo-sex or almost sex (of course it does) and then they talk about it. For hours and hours and hours. For once this isn’t the book where sex completely overwhelms everything else – this is the book where TALKING about sex completely overwhelms everything else. Sex, their powers, their angst, their issues it’s vast chunks of people sat around talking about woo-woo and Anita’s vagina. All made even more painfully long winded by people having not a braincell between them so having to have everything explained to them AGONISINGLY SLOWLY!
Augustine’s issues: woo-woo, sexy times then absolute chapters of post-match analysis with him completely not understanding, well, anything – we have pages battling his issues, his emotions and the problems of his woo-woo. We have chapters of it. Samuel’s family drama – woo-woo, sexy times, then more pages of post-match analysis. Then we have Richard’s issues for more endless discussion. Then Anita and Asher have a woo-woo/sexy/angsty discussion moment. Over and over again, the pattern repeats itself – all interspaced with the endlessly returning woo-woo drama: the super-ardeur means Anita’s vagina will eat all of the guests – let us talk about this for chapters on end!
We actually have a pregnancy scare in this book. And it’s a background plot point – I kid you not, it is driven into the background by the endless woo-woo/sexy/discussion scenes in this book.
Normally when I review a book I mention what happened in the book and how it relates to the story to date. With the Anita Blake series, I have actually read all the books and am now coming back to them which gives me the unique opportunity to also mention how what happened relates to the future. I wouldn’t usually do that because of spoilers and because it’s not really relevant most of the time – but in this case there’s a strong exception.
Because things happen in Danse Macabre, great big important things that are then completely and utterly irrelevant, never to be spoken of again, never to matter again. Big revelations and progress in what should be the meta plot happen but they have no impact on the rest of the story
