Laughing Corpse

Rating:
Summary: Vampires and zombies and voodoo priests... Oh my!
Review: Anita Blake is quite a busy girl in this second installment of the series. Gaynor, a sadistic millionaire, has offered Anita a million dollars to raise a very old corpse. Anita is an expert in raising the dead, but there's a catch in this particular request. Human sacrifice is required in order to raise the three-hundred-year-old corpse -- something Anita isn't prepared to do. However, Gaynor won't take no for an answer. To make matters worse, a powerful zombie has killed various families and Anita has sought out help from one of the most powerful and evil voodoo priestesses she's ever met. It is up to Anita to find the monster and the person who had raised it.

The Laughing Corpse is action-packed and suspenseful from beginning to end. Just when you think Anita is out of the woods something else comes along. This novel is as entertaining and riveting as Guilty Pleasures. There is a lot of gore and gruesome descriptions in this one, but said descriptions aren't gratuitous -- except for the police murdered scenes involving slaughtered children. That was a bit too much. I also wish that Jean-Claude had been in more scenes. He is one sexy vampire! I look forward to reading the third installment with gusto. I can see why so many people swear by this series. It's as addicting as chocolate! Highly recommended...

Rating:
Summary: Quality Down from GP, Still an Okay Junk Food Read
Review: The Anita Blake series is not deep and subtly crafted. I have no urge to immediately give a second reading to pick up all the nuances and depths I missed the first time through because one can catch everything on one reading. They're good fun, but not *great* reading.

The book can stand alone, but since you're here at a book store, pick up 'Guilty Pleasures' to make everything crystal clear. Also because it's a better book and you might as well see Hamilton at her best to carry you through lesser volumes. The Laughing Corpse is a different book, yes, but the writing quality has dropped as well on objective levels.

This is not a vampire book. Those from GP appear almost as cameos, more to set up future books and to keep them in mind than to further this story. Other characters could have been used for their functions, but it was nice to see the fang gang again. This story concentrates on Anita's abilities as an animator, raising the dead, dealing with zombies, and some of the implications of that power she has been staving off.

Technical writing flaws have been allowed to creep in: comma splices, using the same word "gleaming" three times in ten lines, little distracting teeth-grinders that I still remember the next morning.

More importantly, this volume uses gratuitous gore as sheer padding. The gross-out contest shows the characters involved as immature, unprofessional, and disrespectful of murdered women and children. Is this really what Hamilton wants us to think of Anita and the RPIT crew? The tremendously detailed crime scenes this time around, as opposed to those in GP, make me think someone gave the author a copy of 'All the Gooey Gunk Inside' and, when she found herself 15,000 words short of a novel she used it to pad things out. It's okay in the first murder scene to set up the horror, but elsewhere it's a weary drag on the story's pace. I wound up skimming it in boredom. She should have used another Jean-Claude scene and moved things along on that line, at least, rather than just marking time.

Also, I was persistently thrown off by the long-term voodoo queen of the Midwest being Mexican, and the whole business being treated as if primarily a Mexican religion. Voudoun comes out of francophone Haiti. I would expect Santeria or Spiritism out of an Hispanic community. Read 'The Magic Island' and 'The Serpent and the Rainbow' for some NF on voudoun.

At least a bit more of the story world background is explained, like why vampire criminals are executed in the field rather than any attempts being made at trial and incarceration. Her timeline is off here, though. Vampires have only been legalized two years, Anita has been the Executioner for two years, yet the executioners are said to exist in response to something that happened within that two years. Sloppy, but that's sort of the motif for this volume.

If GP was a bag of Oreos, this was generic chocolate sandwich cookies. Okay for a snack attack, but it could have been better.

Rating:
Summary: Indeed the Laughing Corpse!
Review: This book sucked. I think that Laurell K. Hamilton is the worst author yet. The book was boooooring. It only had like 4 scenes, and one scene lasted 30 pages. It was ridiculous. I could hardly keep my eyes open. For an animator, Anita is really stupid, she doesn't explore any of her powers. All she does is get smart with everybody she not supposed to get smart with, and by mistake discovers more powers. She repeats the same phrases over and over again till you wanna reach through the book and slap her. The scenes with Jean Claude are unoriginal. All they do is repeat the same thing. Anita - I'm not your servant. Jean Claude - yes you are. NO I'M NOT, YES YOU ARE, NO I'M NOT, YES YOU ARE. No dialog at all. Her friends lack personality, she has no back bone at all and a stupid sense of humor. The only action is at the end, but you won't make it past the boring scenes! The cop, Dolph, is just as bland as she is. Don't expect any action to come from there. Dominga Salvador is the only interesting person in the book. I say, if you want a good suspense/mystery, go to the book store and get J. D. Robb's In Death series. I guarantee, you will not have to read about Eve Dallas finding outfits with penguins on them in which to conceal her weapon.