Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter

Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter Guilty Pleasures Volume 1

Marvel/Dabel Brothers

Based on Hamilton's novels and bearing the name as the first novel in the series, I don't know how similar it is to that debut story but I can tell you Anita Blake is an animator, a women able to raise the dead, but who moonlights as a vampire hunter in a United States of America where being a supernatural creature isn't illegal but doing the kind of things such creatures are apt to in the dead of night is.

The books are bestsellers and there's apparently a TV show in the works. You can see why. Since Christopher Lee came on as Prince Charming with fangs the sexual allure of vampires has been pretty much a major selling point, Anne Rice took that up several notches with the release of Interview With A Vampire and you've got several variations on that theme for the current generation; chief among them Stephenie Meyer's Twilight but with enough room for many more successes such as Hamilton's Anita Blake that adds a female detective schtick to the genre.

This book collect issues 1-6 of a comic book series, and by its hardcover nature you know that is what its long-term intention was: to reach a mainstream book readership not just comic fans. As such, three writers are involved in adapting the story, and you can tell where each one changes stylistically even though there's a strong editorial feel directing the story presented. Booth's art doesn't appeal to me here as actual straight imagery as the pictures within the frames can be over-rendered, despite this it works remarkably well as sequential art though it does tend towards posing figures which also leads me to presume this is an editorial decision to heighten the romantic sexual allure that its more familiar book readers may want to see - Irrespective of this, the reason they've got her with a white face on the cover has to be a marketing decision hoping comic book readers will mistake her for Death from DC's The Sandman series.

Storywise, what we have inside is a chick-lit Gothic romance detective story wherein Anita Blake is compromised into finding out who's killing vampires illegally. Despite finding myself ticking off reasons why this book shouldn't appeal to me I still had me seduced into following it through to the end, which makes the fact that it doesn't conclude within this collection being a major disappointment - If you buy a hardback book I seriously don't think you should expect it to be a part work.

For those who are curious and would care to peak at some of the pages we've included a clip from Youtube with artwork from the book: