Danse Macbre by Laurell K. Hamilton
I’ll start this review by saying that everything below the cut is a spoiler. I’ve spoiled the meta-plot a bit, and described the events that happen in the book some as well. I’d say I was posting plot spoilers, but that is predicated on the idea that there is a plot to spoil.
To sum up my review, in case you just want to know what I thought of it, I can say this:?
If you want porn, there’s reasonably good porn online. It is not always easy to find the better stuff, but several of those sites have ratings, and the first actually has a publisher/editor type person, but pretty much all the porn that is there is better porn than Danse Macbre.
If you want an exicting plot, with intrigue or maybe a murder mystery or just preternatural wierdness, then this is not the place to go. If you haven’t read Micah, the novella which precedes Danse Macbre in the storyline, go read that. It’s not required for understanding Danse, but it at least has a decent plot, and a decent sex scene (It’s short). If you have already read Micah, I suggest looking at Kelley Armstrong’s work, or Kim Harrison, or for a less-vampirey/werewolfy flavor, Laura Anne Gilman’s Retrievers series.
If you are reading Danse Macbre because, like me, you’ve read all the Anita Blake stuff, and are probably going to read it all, eventually, then you don’t need this review. If you read Micah and have hopes for this book, like I did, let me dash them now. You can still read and enjoy it, but don’t expect any kind of great goodness.
I called this review “Plot, What Plot?” for a reason.
Girl taught me the phrase “PWP” or “Plot, What Plot?” when describing fan fiction. Specifically, erotic slash fan fiction, where there’s no plot, not excuse for a plot,? it’s just Kirk and Spock or Harry and Snape getting down and doing the dirty. On alt.sex.stories.moderated we called such a thing “stroke” fiction, because it had one and only one purpose: to get you off. It’s the Penthouse Forum of erotica, although much of it is better than that tripe. Even
Danse Macbre.
As a writer who struggles with plot, especially for long stories, and novels, I’ve done a lot of research about what constitutes an engaging and successful plot. There are several structures there, from the Marshall Plan, to the Hero’s Journey, and most fit into the complication and three disasters format. Even if your story or novel doesn’t fit that exact pattern, a good plot has a couple of basic pieces.
First, something happens to the hero right off. Some thing has changed their lives, and they spend the rest of the novel attempting to fix it. They don’t have to succeed, they might change goals slightly, but they overcome the big problem, and thing go back to normal, or to a new normal.
Second, as the hero tries to solve the big problem, there are complications or disasters along the way: basically it gets harder and harder to succeed until the very end, when the hero saves the day, or at least the climax is resolved.
There’s a lot of wiggle room here, the hero can “refuse the call” and wander for a while, but always is forced to return to it. The hero can fail. The hero should grow or change through the process, and become better or more powerful or something, otherwise, it’s just an adventure.
Bascially, the first chapter, even the first paragraph is a promise. Here are the first two paragraphs of Danse Macbre:
It was the middle of November. I was supposed to be out jogging, but instead I was sitting at my breakfast table talking about men, sex, werewolves, vampires, and that thing that most unmarried but sexually active women fear most of all—a missed period.
Veronica (Ronnie) Sims, best friend and private detective, sat across from me at my little four-seater breakfast table. The table sat on a little raised alcove in a bay window. I did breakfast most mornings looking at the view out onto the deck and the trees beyond. Today, the view wasn’t pretty, because the inside of my head was too ugly to see it. Panic will do that to you.
That’s pretty good. It follows right on what was going on in Micah, near the end. Anita is worried that she is pregnant. She hasn’t told her men, but has taken the issue to her normal confidant, Ronnie. This plot develops over the first few chapters.
For fans of the series, we know things between Anita and Ronnie aren’t that simple, and that plays out as Ronnie makes the pregnancy problem worse by announcing it to several of the potential fathers before Anita gets the chance to do so.
This at least, feels like we’re going to have a plot, and everything. It’s huge, it’s shattering, and could change everything about Anita and the men in her life. I was feeling somewhat good about it, but also a little worried. Several books ago, Anita faced a similar life-changing event, when we thought she might get lycanthropy. That wasn’t resolved in the book at all, except for a little note at the end, when she says “I didn’t get furry.”? As the point of dramatic tension for the whole book, that, well, kind of sucked.
There was more going on in that book, IIRC, and the lycanthropy thing wasn’t the primary focus: it wasn’t the promise we started with, so that was okay, but it wasn’t really resolved. This was Hamilton’s plan, as we discover in Micah that she has 4 different kinds of lycanthropy, which is supposedly impossible, so we’ll cut her a break on that one. Nevertheless, the last few books have left me with a sense that we don’t get our promises kept, so I read on with trepidation.
We also discover that there’s this whole vampire-ballet thing going on, as well as a huge cast party afterwards where Anita is going to pick a new pomme de sang to feed her ardeur, or to put it in less specific terms, she needed somebody to feed her powers off of, or risk losing control.
Then there’s a bunch of preternatural stuff as Anita has to deal with two Masters of the City, ostensibly Jean-Claude’s friends, but still pushy, manipulative vampires. That feels like a taste of what the later party is going to be like, and we get a feel for the meta-plot as Belle Morte shows up and does some stuff because she can.Anita and Jean-Claude do something particularly powerful, giving everyone a bunch of extra power and abilities.
Despite all these vampire shenanigans, we’re still focused on the whole baby thing. It’s foremost in Anita’s mind, and colors everything she does, even how she uses her powers. This is good. We get a decent first-crisis when Richard figures out that she’s pregnant, or thinks she might be pregnant, and all the men have to deal with it. (Although, I guess this is closer to a second crisis with the whole other vampire thing.)
The next part of the book is Anita dealing with her men: both the necessities of life, and their reaction to her potential pregnancy, and their possible fatherhood. There’s some sex in there, I think, or at least the possibility of it. Anita’s pee test comes back positive so she calls her OB-GYN for a second opinion, and for a test for Vlad’s Syndrome (the bad thing that can happen if you have babies with vampires) and for Mowgli’s Syndrome (the bad thing that can happen if you have sex with lycanthropes in their animal form). I remember the former, as someone else had it. The latter, I don’t recall, and it felt knew.
The truth is, there’s so much going on preternaturally that you really don’t know what’s going on. At some point Asher got an animal to call, I missed that — when did that happen? I thought it happened in this book, but I missed where it was mentioned. Maybe it was in the last book?? I don’t know
Since her books, especially the last 4 or 5 have all suffered from PWP, it’s hard to remember what happened. There’s not recap, there’s not encluing, nothing. Sex scenes are interesting, but they pass on after they happen if there’s no effect on the plot.
Stuff keeps happening but it all seems rushed and irrelevant, and Anita spends most of her time not thinking about it, so we don’t get to see it either.
Then the two biggest flaws of the book happen. First, we find out she’s not pregnant, about halfway through the book.
Well, that was an easy end to the complication, eh?
Yes, even not being pregnant has some issues, but that is resolved pretty quickly as Anita, now thrilled to be not-pregnant, fucks her boys several times, nearly dying it’s so intense. Yeah, okay.
The second thing is that there’s this big battle at the end at the ballet, when the lead vampire of the ballet, Merlin, tries to roll everyone, and Anita stops him (after going for a recharge/sex break). He’s all powered up by and to find out about the Mother of all Darkness, who did show up earlier, and nearly force Anita to change into a lycanthrope. Oh, did I leave that out? Maybe Hamilton should have too.
There’s a bunch of shit happening in this book, and none of it has anything to do with our promise and that’s the main problem with this book. It should have ended right after she found out she wasn’t pregnant. It should have dealt more completely with one issue, without having to deal with them all. We’ve got all her men, each changes some, we find out more about why there are so many, and what’s going on there, but it’s more like this book is a long chapter in a longer work.
Yes, Anita is a series character. Yes, she needs to have some big thing outside of herself that’s a problem. The biggest one, her acceptance of herself as ‘one of the monsters’ and her decision about Richard vs Jean-Claude (neatly sidestepped, by the way) answered Anita’s staring “problems.”? But Hamilton didn’t give us anything really good to replace it with. Instead we are getting these books that keep powering her up, without any real understanding of what it means.
I sense that there’s a big battle with the Vampire Council and the Mother of All Darkness lurking out there near the end of the series. My only question is if Hamilton will resolve it before she dies, or if I’ll give up on her just like I did on Robert Jordan, because she is putting out fluff that doesn’t make sense, and isn’t really very hot.
