The Laughing Corpse - Laurell K. Hamilton [130]
I have a picture of me standing in that awful dress with Catherine’s arm around me. We’re both smiling. Friendship is strange stuff.
Jean-Claude sent me a dozen white roses in the hospital. The card read, “Come to the ballet with me. Not as my servant, but as my guest.”
I didn’t go to the ballet. I had enough problems without dating the Master of the City.
I had performed human sacrifice, and it had felt good. The rush of power was like the memory of painful sex. Part of you wanted to do it again. Maybe Dominga Salvador was right. Maybe power talks to everyone, even me.
I am an animator. I am the Executioner. But now I know I’m something else. The one thing my Grandmother Flores feared most. I am a necromancer. The dead are my specialty.
AFTERWORD
by Laurell K. Hamilton
IT WAS THE second summer in a row that St. Louis had suffered weeks of one hundred-plus temperatures, with a hundred percent humidity. As the heat closed around us like some gigantic sweaty fist, I began thinking of murder. It was my second summer of plotting murder. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe I’m just not right. The family who raised me would probably agree with the latter, but that means nothing; most of us are strangers to our birth families. The real telling point is that my friends would agree, but they like me anyway, or sometimes even because I’m not quite right. Because they aren’t quite right either. To the handful of normal, well-adjusted friends that I have, my apologies. To the rest of you, argue if you can.
Once upon a time, it bothered me that I don’t think like the majority of people. That I walk through a world where the worst can happen, and often does. That I see danger where most people see nothing. I am told that I think like a cop. I’d ignore that, except that it’s policemen who told me. I’m told by people in the military that I think like a soldier. Though both the police and the military add that I’d make a good detective but a lousy uniform; a good officer, but a bad enlisted. I’m just not good at taking other people’s orders. Sorry, but I’m not.
The book you’re holding in your hands was a paperback original almost ten years ago. The fact that it is coming out in hardback is a testament to how devoted the fans of this series have become, and how two stubborn petite women managed to change the publishing industry, almost by accident.
This particular petite woman found hard-boiled detective fiction the summer after college. The male detectives got to cuss, have sex, and kill people. The women, even the most liberated of them, didn’t cuss much, if there was sex it was sanitized or off stage, and if they killed someone they had to feel very, very bad about it. This seemed unfair to me, so I decided to write a character who would even the playing field. Enter Anita Blake, the other stubborn petite woman. I might have gotten a little carried away with the whole idea that Anita needed to be tougher, rougher, and just more, than the men. To my knowledge, she has the highest kill count in literature outside of war novels. She cusses like a sailor, and the sex is hot enough that many fans claim as couples they read my books to each other as foreplay.
My original plan was actually to never have to do sex on paper. I wanted every touch, every caress, to be so amazing that I didn’t have to resort to writing actual intercourse. But six books into the series, we did the dirty deed on paper, and because I’d spent five books building up to it, I couldn’t skimp on the scene. Or felt I couldn’t. Besides, I’d written books where every crime, every bit of necessary violence was kept on full camera, no flinching. So that when it came to sex, and I wanted the camera to do that 1940s pan to the sky; I couldn’t do it. What did it say about me as a person that I hadn’t paled at showing murder and mayhem