A review by caitlin_bookchats
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures by Stacie Ritchie, Laurell K. Hamilton, Jessica Ruffner, Ron Lim, Brett Booth

1.0

Trigger Warning

descriptions of torture (vague), clunky discussions of "junkies" (for vampirism), and there might be other things I just don't remember well, but what I do remember is it's alluded to that one male character is the survivor of a traumatic childhood attack by a vampire. Said attack seemed analogous to a violent sexual assault and said character is not handled with any delicacy or nuance.

Read this for KissWAds bookclub. It was... not good. I think maybe back in 1994, when this was kind of pioneering I can see how it was something! different! But today it reads as a more objectifying version of later supernatural detectives with poorly developed characters. (Well, their appearances and muscles, etc. are well developed, but they all feel like cardboard cutouts or something.)

ALSO, the mystery was pretty easy to figure out, tbh. The big bad ye olde female vampire who felt very much like the predecessor of Jane (of the Volturi) was pretty legit though and it was nice for once that the female characters weren't the TSTL ones. Although I really don't like that trope in any sense.

I was disappointed with the way many characters were handled without any real nuance or delicacy. Particularly one character who seemed to be

analogous to a male survivor of violent sexual assault as a child but was portrayed as some kind of "broken" vampire-loving "freak" who was more or less TSTL. I was really disappointed by this.