Incubus Dreams
12th book in the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Series
by Laurell K Hamilton

This was the much anticipated newest release in Laurell K Hamilton’s popular Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series. The series is now twelve books long and still going strong.

At least that is what Ms. Hamilton and her publishers would like you to think. At the beginning of the series Anita Blake the heroine of our series was a jaded young woman who had given her heart and body to a man only to be rejected in the end when her fiancé’s family found her lacking. Since then she vowed to wait for love and marriage before giving herself to anyone ever again. Over time we have seen her grow and flesh out emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. She has been caught up in a bittersweet love triangle with a master vampire and an Ulfric (wolf king) werewolf that could end up granting all parties involved ultimate power, or it could destroy them all. She is a master necromancer, a devote Episcopalian, Nimir Ra of the Man Eater’s Wereleopard Pard, retainer to the police, a powerful animator and she loves penguins, coffee mugs with snarky messages and coffee. Anita Blake is known as the scourge of the undead, The Executioner yet here she is trying to set up house with the very monsters she is supposed to hate. It is a recipe for the ultimate series, yet somehow Ms. Hamilton has lost touch with her characters and the series is running rampant through the red light district of our town unchecked.

“Incubus Dreams” is Ms. Hamilton’s longest novel yet, six hundred and fifty-eight pages to be exact, and her most smut filled work to date. There are over six hundred pages in this latest installment, and though I am loathe to criticize any author’s work that size I feel an exception must be made here. Despite it’s phenomenal length “Incubus Dreams” turned out to be Hamilton’s most disappointing work yet. The reader spends their time reading four hundred plus pages where the main character is either having sex with various characters or is discussing having sex with these and other characters. Less than two hundred pages, and that is being generous, actually deal with the case that Anita Blake is handling. As for character development, well we the readers are left wondering how Anita Blake went from a “Madonna” to a slut, to paraphrase Bernardo, a character from the eleventh book in the series entitled: “Obsidian Butterfly”.

Although we have seen Ms. Blake evolving from the shy and embarrassed wall flower she once was into a strong female who is capable of having an emotional and sexual relationship with a person the readers, I’m sure, were not ready to see her toss all of her inhibitions to the wind and begin jumping every single male she meets. Due to the vampire marks with Jean Claude she has apparently inherited his incubus and in her previous books “Narcissus in Chains” and “Cerulean Sins” we see that this is handled by her feeding off of sexual energy from Micah, Nathaniel and Jean Claude. Richard refuses to “be food” and since feeding off of one person continuously will kill them we can see why she needs Nathaniel and Micah. There is a “one time” accident when Asher and Jason are involved, however we are given the impression that such an occurrence will never happen again, Anita will simply not allow it to.

“Cerulean Sins” also leaves us with many questions that “Incubus Dreams” promises to answer and doesn’t. in “Cerulean Sins” we meet the Master of Jean Claude’s line Belle Morte, not in person but through sendings of himself through her minions, and most importantly we find out that the oldest vampire ever, she who has slept for thousands of years and whose creatures cannot be killed, The Mother of all Darkness is awakening and has seemingly taken an interest in Anita as well. What will happen when the Mother awakens? How will Belle Morte take her defeat by a mere and seemingly plain mortal woman set with her, and most importantly will the angst and sexual tension between Asher, Anita and Jean Claude be resolved? These are the questions “Cerulean Sins” leaves us with, all of which are unanswered still and not even touched by the end of “Incubus Dreams”

Instead “Incubus Dreams” introduces two new vampires, Requiem and Byron, who are two nobodies that are introduced for the sake of screwing Anita. But wait, the list of Anita’s harem goes on. By the end of the book has had hot steamy sex with Requiem, Byron, Jean Claude, Damian, Nathaniel, Jason, Micah and Richard. Not to mention Anita practically has sex with a vampire in police custody, during a police interrogation in a church in front of police officers. It is a damn good thing she only has sex with the monsters who happen to have super natural healing abilities and are immune to diseases or else she would have spent the rest of the time in the book at a clinic. How it is she can even walk after the marathon sex is beyond me.

There are some good points to the book though, we get to find out a little more of Nathaniel’s life and he has some good character development. No longer is he the submissive and subservient sex toy that Reina and Gabriel turned him into, he is instead an actual person with determination, goals, interests and willfulness that makes him even more endearing to the readers. We also get to see Anita’s fellow animator slash apprentice Larry Kirkland marry the love of his life Detective Tammy Reynolds in a not so traditional wedding held on Halloween.

As for the case, well the bad guys get away and that’s just dandy with Anita. What the hell? At first she’s upset that the bad guys got away and tries to get the police to aide her and when she gets no help she just gives up the chase? Since when has Anita ever let justice slide? Perhaps this was Hamilton’s way of showing “maturity” in Anita, she could have chosen a much better method.

Over all “Incubus Dreams” is just a disappointment. The book is riddled with tons of typos (aren’t published works supposed to be free or at the very least nearly free of these sorts of things?); re-used lines that were witty and funny three books ago and are just clichéd now; characters who are out of character or regressing to their Id stages, over used and unnecessary sex scenes where Ms. Hamilton borrows descriptions from old scenes and warps them to fit new ones; and characters who spend who chapters talking about having sex before having sex, and then again after having sex.

I will probably read the next installment to the series when it is published and continue to follow the series out of sheer morbid curiosity. I have come twelve books into this series and would like to see its eventual conclusion, but I do not recommend spending money on this book. If you absolutely have to own all of the books in the series then buy a used paperback edition.

Joana’s Rating: