Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #25) By: Laurell K. Hamilton (Book Review)
***This review will contain spoilers***
Summary:
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.
Well...this isn't Hamilton's worst book ever. But it definitely leaves a lot to be desired. At least she had some type of plot going on with of course the last 100 pages containing most of the action. One thing she consistently does is add a bunch of sex scenes that us the readers want nothing to do with and speeds through the actual action/ plot of the story. I will be brutally honest here if she would cut all the unnecessary garbage with the ardeur and sex scenes we would be lucky to maybe have a short story. Max 100 pages at that. Again, who the fuck clears her books for publication because it has become so below par to the type of quality books Hamilton used to develop that it feels like a completely different author. Or maybe a different personality took over Hamilton. Either way I feel cheated out of what could have been an amazing book series with a bad ass protagonist. And no just cause Anita shoots guns and stabs people in the chest doesn't make her a bad ass protagonist. Especially, since she has been reduced to a fuck puppet for Hamilton to vicariously live through.
I have read my far share of fan-fiction stories in my teenage and adult years but man this series takes the cake on it! She has turned this series into a fan-fiction mess where each book features/ spotlights a lover/sex toy of Anita. Domino ends up being our big bang of the book...pun intended. Domino has been on the backburner for quite some time and what better way for Hamilton to trim down Anita's list of sex partners then to bang Domino one scene and have him killed in the next one. I'm not joking from one scene to the next he's gone!
I'm happy the big gang is finally out of St. Louis and in Ireland. I much prefer when the location changes because typically it means she has some sort of plot. With the way Hamilton wrote about the fey in Ireland makes me believe that the Anita Blake and Merry Gentry series might take place within the same Universe which would be intriguing but in all reality if those two ever did meet it would be a huge pissing contest on which one was the biggest whore...I mean which one had the biggest arsenal of dick...oops sorry I meant to say which one had the most beautiful lovers lol.
It really sucks that the majority of actual good scenes and where the actual plot moves around is within the last hundred pages. It wasn't hard to figure out that the big bad behind all the mass killings and turnings in Ireland was the big bad she who turned Damian. What is the point of Anita being overpowered to the point that she absorbed the Dark Mother's powers but yet can still get kidnapped? And be sedated? Isn't the whole point of making her more than human is so that shit like that doesn't happen? How is it when she was just a little Animator she was able to hunt and kill a bunch of vampires and shapeshifters but being OP she can't hold her own?
I'm happy that the whole prophecy of the King of Tigers 'marrying' a tiger was finally fulfilled/done with. You would think with all the old ass vampires and Harlequin that Anita inherited that one of them would have more information on said prophecy. There are more Harlequin that disappeared/ vanished once Anita defeated the Dark Mother but several of which were in service to she who made Damian and one of them killed Domino and fed Anita his blood to fulfill the prophecy. It wasn't a marriage between the two but a mingling of the blood. Of course everything ends in human sacrifice but it was a nice change of pace in comparison to the usual garbage we're used to.
In this book, Hamilton focused on a second triumvirate of Anita's with Nathaniel and Damian. You would think being part of something so rare would give Anita some type of power boost yet when it really mattered that shit was rendered useless. Aren't we passed magical chains that can cut psychic links when she's literally linked to everyone? I felt like the actual action scenes were beyond rushed and we were robbed of an epic battle between Anita and Moroven. How amazing would it have been to have such an epic battle especially, since Moroven admitted that she was first a fey goddess before becoming a vampire which is why there is no one else like her. Instead we had an anti-climactic ending where Anita wasn't even directly involved but holding hands with Nathanial and Damian while she connected with ghosts of the deceased/victims of Moroven's kiss.
There's one thing that I need to mention that absolutely infuriated me and made me want to burn this book to ashes. When Anita and Nathanial were trying to comfort Damian and help him with his night terrors Nathanial forced Damian to have sex with him. Essentially, he was able to roll him like a vampire can and he even admitted that he wanted to do it. What is Hamilton's obsession with turning straight characters into gay ones??? Rape??? That's what turns you on? It wasn't bad enough Hamilton has written about orgies but she has gone one step further and introduced rape but tried to make it all okay.
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