Affliction (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #22)

by Laurell K. Hamilton

[tellemonstar]

Cross-posted at Book Reviews With The Blogmonstar

So I was having a reading slump. Thankfully, Affliction has lifted me out of it. Definitely the best Anita Blake book for a while. Less sexytimes, more zombies. Woo!

*DISCLAIMER: This book did contains some fairly descriptive sex scenes, and this review will make mention of them. This is your first and final notice.

Okay, so I admit, that was somewhat rambly. I apologise. But really, Affliction gave us all the best parts of the Anita-verse. Zombies (really freaky, piece themselves back together and continue eating your face off zombies), deep-seeded personal demons, ass-kicking and flamethrowers. What isn’t there to like, really.

Speaking of zombies. This was practically the beginnings of a zombie apocalypse and it was great. Originally it began with a phone call from Micah’s mother, telling Anita that his father was dying and could he come home to say goodbye. Turns out not only was Micah’s dad suffering from a pretty bad zombie bite, it was freaking well rotting him from the inside. Which is probably one of the worst ways I could think of to die. Anita soon figured out that Micah’s dad wasn’t the only victim and there were others.

Not only was there zombies, and these were really gross even for zombies, there was the return of our old and disgusting friends, rotting vampires. It made for some awesome action scenes, and some very interesting injuries and casualities. Anita was forced to make one of those difficult decisions that she occasionally has to make, which I won’t spoil here, but it certainly added for some additional guilt-conflict on Anita’s behalf.

We learnt some more about the Werecreatures Coalition that Micah heads up and about just how the Vampire Council will work in the US. Some of the old vampires are too used to the European council’s ways of handling things to be entirley at ease with the idea, which is understandable. Some of the werecreature groups seem to be having trouble playing nicely with the others.

I think for the fans of the series who were starting to get fed-up with amount of time Anita spend in the bedroom with her various lovers this book comes as a nice surprise. There was exactly three times when Anita was getting sexytimes with one (or two) of her men. First time was feeding the ardeur, second was comfort sex and the third time was, ‘hey I love you let’s get kinky’ sex. So, not bad compared to a lot of the other books were it was almost a case of, well since we’re naked, or let’s do it anyways. I only had to skim over the third time, simply because I’m not a fan of what is apparently called ‘breath-play’. Me likies breathing, ok?

There was also a lot of personal issues dealt with, mostly by Anita, and whilst all bar two of them weren’t really major issues, they were ones that needed to be resolved, even in the midst of both a personal problem and a battle. The book’s resolution wound up with Anita accepting one of the parts of her self she has been fighting for so long, because it is the part that brought her Jean-Claude, Micah, Nathaniel and her other loves/lovers. It was good to see her finally embrace that part of herself and stop fighting it.

Definitely one of the most story-driven novels in the series for some time, and a nice change to have most of Anita’s favourite people back in the one book.