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(More customer reviews)"The Midnight Cafe" is the second of three hardback editions that collect several novels in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. "Club Vampyre" had the first three stories and "The Midnight Cafe" has the next three: "Lunatic Cafe," "Bloody Bones," and "Killing Dance." That last one has proven to be the pivotal novel in the series.
In "Lunatic Cafe" our heroine no longer bears the marks of Jean-Claude or any other master vampire and is exploring a relationship with Richard, the middle school teacher. Of course there are problems: Richard is a werewolf whose pack leader is threatening to kill him, Jean-Claude will not take "no" for an answer and has a female vampire who wants to kill Anita, and Dolph wants help identifying the something that is killing lycanthropes (shapeshifters). The Lunatic Cafe is the name of the hangout where the werefolk meet and Anita is finding out more about their kind than she really wants to know. Good thing they want her help in finding out who is butchering their kind, although her involvement is certainly a mixed blessing.
As always with Hamilton's Anita Blake novels, she managed to bring everything together by the end of the story. With each book in the series I become more convinced that the "Vampire Hunter" label is to attract fans of Buffy, but Anita is really an Animator (she was a Vampire Hunter in the time BEFORE the first novel) and these books are considerably more gruesome. One of the subplots in "The Lunatic Cafe" concerns a pornographic/snuff film with werewolves and a human girl, with Edward showing up to avenge her death. These are very intense horror novels and Buffy wannabees picking these up without having a clue as to what awaits them inside are not going to sleep for a week. Hamilton has created an alternative reality where monsters have legal rights, and she explores this world with creativity and intelligence. Her heroine endures a lot of physical damage in these books and the mysteries she investigates are always complex. This is a first rate horror series that deserves its reputation and its growing following.
"Bloody Bones" is the name of a eating place out in the sticks it is also the name of something much, much worse. Anita and her trainee Larry (not Lawrence) Kinkaid are out in the sticks of Missouri to raise a bunch of really old zombies to settle a development issue. But then Dolph calls Anita to tell her the local cops need her help with a murder investigation that sure looks to our heroine like an incredible fast vampire using a really big sword. Of course, these and every other plot line in the book are all related. The "romantic" triangle between Anita, Jean-Claude and Richard is pretty much on the back burner this time around, although Jean-Claude and his pet werewolf Jason show up to help Anita meet Serephina, the local master. Boy, does that ever turn out to be a mondo-mistake.
"The Killing Dance" is the pivotal novel in the series. When Edward her bounty hunter friend calls up Anita you know it is not going to be good news and it is not. Someone has offered him big bucks to kill her and he has refused the job, not so much out of friendship as from the fact that he can kill more people guarding her than just bumping her off. Of course, the first assassination attempt takes place before Edward makes it to town and when he does the news is even worse. The offer is now up to $500,000 provided Anita is dead within twenty-four hours. But if there is one thing we know about Anita it is that she worries about everybody else before she takes time to think about herself and that fact that people she does not know are trying to kill her for reasons she does not understand. Certainly her friends are having problems that are even more complicated than normal.
Anita's love life is finding new levels above boiling and the price on her head is not helping things. While she has chosen to date Richard Zeeman the werewolf, Jean-Claude the master vampire of St. Louis is still the most beautiful corpse she has ever seen. But Richard is being challenged by Marcus, another alpha male in the pack, for the position of Ulfric and he refuses to deal with the challenge out of a position of strength, despite Anita's desperate council, which means this is going to be another bad ending for everybody concerned, especially since Marcus does not harbor any such moral illusions. Further complicating the issue is Rania, the sadistic lupa of Marcus, who makes S&M porn movies of shape shifters with humans. Jean-Claude has his own problems, with the arrival in town of the ancient vampire Sabin, who wants Anita to cure him of the illness that is killing him. Sabine's human servant, Dominic Dumare, is a necromancer so Anita has more enemies to contend with this time around than any of the previous efforts.
From the vantage point of today looking back at this 1997 novel it is clear that this is the pivotal novel in the Anita Blake series. The one constant up to this point had been Anita's refusal to get off the fence and choose between Richard and Jean-Claude and for readers who were waiting for her to choose you could say that this decision has been made for her. But not only does she finally take one of them to bed, she finds a reason for not doing the same with the other. Everything changes after this point, and very little of it in a good way. "The Killing Dance" also represents a significant change in Hamilton as a writer in that this is the point at which the sexuality in her stories becomes explicit. For many fans this is the point where they lament that the Anita Blake series "jumps the shark," and front this point on the balance between horror and sex really moves from the former to the latter. You are going to have to make up your mind on this score on your own.
The books are similar in that the menagerie of monsters continues to grow, with faeries and worse being added to the roster, while Anita's powers as a Necromancer continue to grow at the most opportune moments. In terms of writing pure horror, Hamilton knows how to lay it out big time. If Hollywood ever dared to film these books as she writes them they would be NC-17 (at least). Yes, Hamilton tends to play the same cards in getting Anita out of her dire predicaments, but as a writer of horror novels with scenes of disquieting intensity that will make it difficult for you to sleep at night, she has Lovecraft, King and Barker beat. She is so good at coming up with scenes of outright horror that go on and on, that I did not let my teenager daughter read these books until she was in college.
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The Midnight Cafe: The Lunatic Cafe / Bloody Bones / the Killing Dance
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