Krissys Books: Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #25) by Laurell K. Hamilton

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #25) by Laurell K. Hamilton

Review:

In her twenty-fifth adventure, vampire hunter and necromancer Anita Blake learns that evil is in the eye of the beholder...

Anita has never seen Damian, her vampire servant, in such a state. The rising sun doesn’t usher in the peaceful death that he desperately needs. Instead, he’s being bombarded with violent nightmares and blood sweats.

And now, with Damian at his most vulnerable, Anita needs him the most. The vampire who created him, who subjected him to centuries of torture, might be losing control, allowing rogue vampires to run wild and break one of their kind’s few strict taboos.

Some say love is a great motivator, but hatred gets the job done, too. And when Anita joins forces with her friend Edward to stop the carnage, Damian will be at their side, even if it means traveling back to the land where all his nightmares spring from...a place that couldn’t be less welcoming to a vampire, an assassin, and a necromancer.

Brother husbands, sister wives, constant repetition, oh my!

Almost the entire book were conversations that were repeated and echoed by every character which tended to be between five and ten men all needing to screw Anita and her repeating the same thing to each one of the guys she was with over and over again.

Anita was in conflict with her relationships for about a couple chapters where stuff actually happened then the ending came with a sum up in a nutshell in less than a couple chapters which resulted with me feeling like the entire book was a constant conversation constantly repeated a hundred times over just to get Anita open to being a mother which by the end felt a little too instant - 'ding dong I'm ready'.

I didn't really care for all the 'Anita should be my toy' debates because after 50 pages of defending the same stance by multiple people you just started with just to repeat it with someone else it just got old. It was like okay, I get it already, everyone wants to screw Anita, everyone hates Anita, everyone is jealous of Anita, screw me, screw him, screw them, no fair no fair whaa whaa whaa. Men leaving their girlfriends to be with Anita, men having to juggle their relationship with Anita to make room for more men so they can screw her too.

Anita is the one doll in the toy box all the children on the playground want to play with. She loves all the attention being focused on her but only with its convenient for her, even though she wants everyone to be happy she's very defensive of her poly relationships but she spends all her times dissing any and everyone who isn't a part of their poly world, she spends the rest of her time wanting to focus on her main poly group but she still has tantrums about her orgies and gang bangs not being laid out for her, she says how shes conflicted about having to be a leader and yet all she does is bark orders at people and take control of situations she's in.

Almost the entire book had person after person fighting over who wants, who should or shouldn't have Anita so much that you forget that there's even a plot going on in the book because you only get maybe 5-10 pages of actual story. The rest is the repeated conversations between Anita and her lovers. It distracts from the fact that there's a mystery to solve because there are so many arguments about Anita's poly relationships and her defending it, there are so many conversations between her lovers and her negotiating who gets what and when and how many times and who is allowed to do what when and how it changes the dynamic of their sexual encounters by adding more men to her already endless list of partners.

The other half is spent talking about how others feel about her lovers or how people who want to be her lover feel about her not being their lover too or letting them in on being her lover or how she doesn't care about how anyone feels about the fact that she has all these lovers or that she cuts other people out of the power triangle by not letting them sleep with her.

The people is a couple pages here and there with actual plot the rest of poly- defense with some emotional debate and non - poly member bashing.

Between the whining and the blaming and incessant rambling it was hard to care about the emotional scenes because I was exhausted after all the monotonous poly drama constantly being dictated over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

There were however several mentions of the power shift going on and it was a big deal but I didn't really feel like Hamilton really tapped into it very much.

I would have liked to have gotten more development on that but when the scene came between them and their enemies it just felt silly and not that worth mentioning to begin with.

By the time we get story at the end the book is over and I forgot what the point in it all was. Crimson Death didn't give me that excitement buzz I was hoping for.

There is a lot going on character wise though, the cast involved is massive which was interesting and complicated and often very confusing because there were points I literally had to write down who was who and who was arguing what because there were so many of them talking and the multiple identities, lovers, friends, foes, secondary characters all speaking in one conversation that I had to re-read several sections and keep notes just to remember who was saying what.

Ireland also added another dynamic to the whole journey Anita and her lovers were on as well which felt a little off to me. Anita is starting to feel more like a man and the men are starting to feel more like women to me. Hard to explain the personality shift that's going on but that's just the vibe that I got off it.

The journey also allows Anita to defend her power position and her poly relationships again to a whole new base of characters after it kind of felt like okay we've said this five hundred times lets move on its echoed all over again.

Anita gains both new allies and new enemies - or should I say OLD enemies in this book which opens new avenue for more arguments and battles for them to face as well as new lovers and pets to add to the already growing number she has to balance in her life.

As a whole I really don't know how I feel about Crimson Death. If Hamilton cut out all the poly arguments the book could have been a 20 page novella with actual story in it and it would have been really great but as it is it just felt like too much of the same to me.