Though it starts with an immediate problem Danse Macabre in a matter of paragraphs seems to let all the tension leech out of the possibility of Anita Blake being pregnant. First Anita and her friend Ronnie have a fight about abortions (Anita is pro-life and pro-choice, Ronnie is downright evil in her suggestions that Anita shouldn’t carry the child to term), then Anita gives feeble excuse after excuse not to take a test and be done with the problem, and by the next page Ronnie has started another fight which ends with her admitting that she’s just arguing with Anita in the first place because she’s jealous of Anita’s ever expanding harem of men.

Feeling like the whole scene is the author’s intrusive message to non-fans and the tension flat from Anita’s unbelievable excuses not to take a damn pregnancy test and move on to other things I nearly gave up a mere nine pages in.

At some point in this series action has become stagnant drama and once strong, interesting characters who brought conflict and passion to the stories have become nothing more than outside voices meant only to support, agree with, or have sex with Anita. Case and point: at the beginning of the third chapter Anita and her two live ins can’t even get through a door without a battle of the wills, dominance challenges and a wasteful show of magic. Hamilton also shatters her own world rules willy-nilly leaving the reader feeling less like some great challenge has occurred and been overcome and more like Hamilton has just kept many things from the reader only to reveal them when there’s a dark corner or back alley in which she hasn’t thought of a logical way out. Directly from the prose:

“You can’t carry more than one (form of shape shifting) disease at a time, but I did. A medical impossibility, but blood tests don’t lie. I carried wolf, leopard, lion, and one mystery strain that the doctors couldn’t identify running through my veins.”

So even though she spent six plus books swearing up and down that it was impossible, somehow for Anita is is possible and all without the mess and rules of shape shifting too. By the way Anita is also already a necromancer, magically joined to a werewolf, magical joined to a vampire (and she has powers that only old master vampires can have too), magical joined to several leopards and who knows what else.

Most irritating of all not only is there not a clear end after 560 pages, but Anita is wrathful and eager to punish the whole of the werelions because their king refuses to break his marriage vows and have sex (to save the vampires of course) with her. This, combined with the overwhelming diatribes of how much Anita loves her men, and how people who disagree with her are just jealous( not just Ronnie, but all detractors are portrayed as “jealous” and “petty”), is a massive smack in the face to readers and fans who value monogamy and loyalty. I can’t help but feel that Hamilton’s authorial intrudes are all an attempt to genuinely attack her readers, a feeling I’ve never before had when reading a fiction novel.

In short the actual plot is so buried beneath back story, explanations of the rules and why they don’t apply to Anita, pointless shows of magic and silly dominance challenges and sex scenes that I cannot tell you exactly what it was supposed to be anymore. There’s no longer any passion or connection with these hollow characters, all of who sound more and more like extensions of Anita by the book. The tension is momentary and fleeting, giving the whole book a stodgy, weighed down feeling. And the author intrusions are rampant, eliminating any real flow or meaning to the tale, making it read instead like a vehicle for the author’s defensiveness.

I found myself skipping sections of sex and proto-violence in an effort to just enjoy the story, forcing myself to continue long after I wanted to give up and move on to something I might actually enjoy. The book very nearly got flung into the walls a few times and was closed a put aside often so I could let my temper cool down. I do not intend to try to battle my way through another Anita Blake book, and I am forced to officially give Danse Macabre BookLove’s first “Do Not Finish” tag.