Laurell K. Hamilton

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Laurell K. Hamilton bigraphy, stories - Novelist

Laurell K. Hamilton : biography

February 19, 1963 –

Laurell Kaye Hamilton (born February 19, 1963) is an American fantasy and romance writer. She is best known as the author of two series of stories.

Her New York Times-bestselling Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series centers on Anita Blake, a professional zombie raiser, vampire executioner and supernatural consultant for the police, which includes novels, short story collections, and comic books. Six million copies of Anita Blake novels are in print. Her Merry Gentry series centers on Meredith Gentry, Princess of the Unseelie court of Faerie, a private detective facing repeated assassination attempts.

Both fantasy series follow their protagonists as they gain in power and deal with the dangerous "realities" of worlds in which creatures of legend live.

Reception

Anita Blake

Reader reaction to the series’s shift in tone from crime noir thriller to focus more predominantly on the sexual themes in the series has been mixed, starting with Narcissus in Chains when the main character of Anita Blake becomes infected with the ardeur. The ardeur is a supernatural power inadvertently given to Anita by her vampire Master Jean-Claude that gives her massive amounts of power but also demands that she have sexual intercourse with several different people through the course of a day, sometimes in large groups. Reception to these dynamics and to the usage of sexual abuse in later books has been mixed, with some reviewers commenting that the character of Anita spent too much time "obsessing about whether or not she’s a slut" while others remarked that the erotic themes enhanced the series. In response to these comments, Hamilton issued a blog entitled "Dear Negative Reader" where she addressed a growing number of readers on the Internet that was expressing disappointment in the series’s changes. In the blog Hamilton told the readers that "life is too short to read books you don’t like" and that if they found that the current subject matter pushed "you past that comfortable envelope of the mundane" then "stop reading" and speculated that some of the readers were either "closet readers" or comment based on others’ opinions. The blog entry was negatively received by some readers.

Critical reviewers have also commented on the amount of sex in later books, as in a 2006 review in the The Boston Globe of Micah. The review was largely negative, stating "we were not impressed. Hamilton no doubt appeals to romance and erotica lovers, but it does not take long for the clichés and the constant droning about sex to become tiresome." Other reviewers for The Kansas City Star and Publishers Weekly also commented on the rise in sexual themes in the series. The reviewer for the Kansas City Star stating that "After 13 erotically charged books, boredom has reared its ugly head for the 14th novel in Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, as eroticism becomes mere description…" and Publishers Weekly commenting that Blood Noir had a "growing air of ennui, which longtime readers can’t help sharing as sex increasingly takes the place of plot and character development". ©2008 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. Accessed August 26, 2008

In contrast, a Denver Post review of Danse Macabre took a more positive view of the eroticism in Hamilton’s work. Although it noted that "[t]hose looking for mystery and mayhem on this Anita adventure are out of luck" it also stated that "the main attraction of the Anita Blake novels in the past five years has been their erotic novelty", and "[f]ew, if any, mainstream novels delve so deeply into pure, unadulterated erotica",

Works

Laurell K. Hamilton is the author of two major book series, spin-off comic books, various anthologies, and other stand-alone titles:

  • Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter is an animator and necromancer who raises the dead for a living. She is also a vampire executioner and in later books a U.S. Marshal. Blake live in a fictional St. Louis where vampires and were animals exist and recently gained some rights as citizens. As of May, 2012, there have been over 20 novels in the Anita Blake series. More than 6 million copies of Anita Blake novels have been printed and several have become New York Times bestsellers.
  • Anita Blake comics are the comic book renditions of the Anita Blake series. As of May, 2012, the comic book series has included her first three books, Guilty Pleasures, Laughing Corpse and Circus of the Damned. There was also a special prologue type of comic issued named, "The First Death".
  • Merry Gentry is a Princess of Faerie and a private investigator. She is constantly dodging assassination attempts while juggling life in the "real world" where everyone knows faeries exist. As of September 2011, there have been a total of eight novels in the Merry Gentry series.

Personal life

Laurell Kaye Hamilton was born Laurell Kaye Klein in Heber Springs, Arkansas but grew up in Sims, Indiana with her grandmother Laura Gentry. Her education includes degrees in English and biology from Marion (now Indiana Wesleyan University), a private Evangelical Christian liberal arts college in Marion, Indiana that is affiliated with the Wesleyan Church denomination. She met Gary Hamilton, whom she married, there. They had one daughter together, Trinity.

Hamilton is involved with a number of animal charities, particularly supporting dog rescue efforts and wolf preservation.

Hamilton currently lives in St. Louis County, Missouri, with husband Jonathon Green and daughter Trinity.