Guilty Pleasures

Novel by Laurell K Hamilton (USA) 1993.

Anita Blake is an animator (she raises zombies for a living) but she has earned her nickname of 'The Executioner' for her sideline in vampire slaying. Vampires are now legal citizens in the USA, with associated rights, and killing them is therefore murder. Anita does her killing legally with a death warrant, but someone else is killing vampires and they are not working for the law. Anita finds herself coerced into working for Nikolaos, a hugely powerful master vampire at over a thousand years of age, to find out who is responsible.

Though this wears its influences openly, it is an impeccable piece of work. Setting the plot of Immortal Blood in the world of Live Girls with plenty of Sunglasses After Dark style, this nevertheless has its own fair share of originality. Mick Farren made the undead legal in the sf novel Exit Funtopia, but where he used vampirism as a fad in a fragmented future landscape, Hamilton turns it into a cultural phenomenon. Hence we have the Circus of the Damned, we have freak parties, we have Dead Dave's (a bar run by a policeman expelled from the force for being dead). And we have Guilty Pleasures (the club of the title) owned, staffed and run openly by vampires. With characters fleshed out and human (except of course when they're fleshed out and undead), and set pieces painted vividly, this is one of the most realistic of the new wave of vampire writing. Maybe not quite up to the standard of Immortal Blood but just as essential.