The Works of Laurell K. Hamilton

[chiqui]

I came to this thread through the Rose one, and now I've gotta say I'm really interesting in reading the books. What's the most typically bad one to start with?

[Deleted]

Do you want one with a plot or do you want to go straight to the bad porn? Because I'd say the first...maybe eight Anita Blake books, to Obsidian Butterfly are, while not great literature and possessing numerous annoying character and prose tics, pretty good fun. The porn gets pointless, endless and intolerable at about the Cerulean Sins point, and Incubus Dreams, Micah and Danse Macabre are pretty much unreadable.

The Merry Gentry books are fairly porny from the get-go, but there's still a plot, more or less, in the first two (Kiss of Shadows and Caress of Twilight).

Ooh, look - you can read chapters of The Harlequin. Actually, looks like you can read some chapters of most of them here.

(Um, if you want to read them without putting money in that woman's pocket, I am in no way in possession of pdfs of almost all of them and will in no way send them to you if you PM me, not under any circumstances.)

[Auroranorth]

Oh, God. The commas! Forget faerie men, the woman's got an unnatural attachment to commas. They're everywhere.

I read Chapter 1 and refuse to go further. It's clunky and boring and reads like the kind of fanfic I scan for thirty seconds and hit the back button. She needs an editor and an ego removal.

[Auroranorth]

Double post- just don't make me read The Harlequin as punishment.

I just finished her short story collection, Strange Candy. She wrote "Geese" from Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress #8! I liked that story. Several of them were good- a couple were generic fantasy but none were as screamingly bad as her most recent books have been. I almost wish I hadn't read it. Seeing what's happened between the time she had an editor and now is sad.

[Deleted]

What was 'Geese' about, Aurora? I sold all my S&S to the used bookstore a couple of years ago, and I now really regret it.

[Auroranorth]

spoilers in this post

Dis, it was the story where the heroine was given a geas to kill the villain who slaughtered her family and turned herself into a goose for five years. Shapechanging was her greatest magical gift and she used it to fight him. In retrospect it was a little Sueish but not nearly as bad as she's gotten.

[Deleted]

Hmmmmmmmm, I don't remember that one at all. Not suprising, I guess, since there were, what, 21 Sword & Sworceress books, and I owned almost all of them! And Mary-Sueish could describe about 75% of the S&S stories, so I can't really blame LKH for that.

[Auroranorth]

iceblink said:

What really annoyed me about the Merry books is that they have such an interesting premise that has barely been explored at all because it would take time away from the sex. At least with Anita, there were, what, 8 or 9 books that really got into the details of that world before the sex took over. The Merry books are such a wasted opportunity in comparison.

I've read the first four over the last week. Book one was sort of interesting because she's setting up the courts and plotting out the world. The rest rapidly devolve into repeating her descriptions and sex. And more sex. And talking about sex. And complaining about sex. And sex.

I agree, she could have done so much with the courts and the intricacies involved. Instead, we get group sex in hideously boring detail. And could she please lose the phrase, "He brought me" as an orgasm description? Where did he bring you?

[Deleted]

Equally horrendous is her other orgasm word, "go".

Stupid cow. I used to really enjoy her books, in that trashy entertainment way, and now I can't even enjoy the older ones any more, because I know it's all going to go to hell.

[Deleted]

Hey, did Anita get knocked up or what? I refuse to pay to read the book, and it has an astonishingly long waiting list at the library. I find myself curious as to what happened.