The Laughing Corpse - Laurell K. Hamilton [132]
I combine mystery, fantasy, horror, romance, and science fiction, usually all in one book. Why pick one genre when you can play in all of them?
Thanks to my success the publishing industry has actually begun to solicit mixed genre books, especially urban fantasy mixed genre. I have heard back from editors and agents that people are actually asking writers to send them something “Hamiltonesque.” I feel a little young to be an “esque”, but once I got over the weirdness factor, it was sort of flattering.
None of the imitators, so far, have done nearly as well. Why? I’m writing exactly what I want to write. I think a lot of the imitators are writing this because they think it will sell. I think if your heart isn’t in a book, especially a series, it shows. Most people who are just reading me to try to figure out what I do that has captured so much attention, see the sex and violence and monsters. They think, oh, I’ll put in some vampires, some sex, some violence, and it’ll sell. Not exactly.
If you asked me what I wrote I wouldn’t say I write vampire novels. I certainly wouldn’t say that I write erotica or horror. If pushed, I’d say fantasy because it has the broadest definition. I don’t sit down to a book and think this one will be more of a mystery, or more of a romance. I sit down to a book, and let my characters come talk to me.
I don’t write books about vampires. I write books about people who happen to be vampires. Everybody must be a person first and whatever else second. Anita raises zombies for a living and is a legal vampire executioner, but first she is Anita Blake who lost her mother when she was eight and has never forgiven her father for remarrying. The fact that some of my characters are vampires shapes their character, profoundly, but I think of them first as characters, not first as vampires. Anyone who reads this, and doesn’t understand the distinction, I’m not sure I can explain it to you. Anita has been shaped by her job, by her preternatural abilities with the dead. Shaped and broken and changed by what she has seen and experienced. But first, she was a little girl, and somewhere under all the violence and sex, she is still that little girl, crying for her mother. Jean-Claude is an immortal vampire, the Master Vampire of the City. He is the demon-lover, the dark prince that you both want and fear, but he is also still the peasant boy that was taken from his family, at a very tender age, because the wife of the nobleman who owned their land thought he was beautiful and would be a fit companion for the noble’s son. Somewhere under all that suave charm is still the confusion he must have felt from being taken out of a world of poverty to a world of opulence.
Having written that last sentence, I realize, that I didn’t know Jean-Claude’s back-story when I wrote The Laughing Corpse. He was just a cute dead guy to me back then. I was still yelling loud and long that I would never use him as a romantic lead. I’d kill him first. In fact, he was supposed to die at the end of the third book, Circus of the Damned. But when the time came, I couldn’t do it. Because, by then, Anita would have missed him, and so would I. I began the series believing, as Anita did, that the monsters are monstrous, and people are somehow better just because they aren’t vampires. It would take us several books to realize that the world was not black and white, but oh, so gray. Anita’s journey as a character was part of my own journey as I struggled to understand what I was writing and why. I write first so I can read it. So I can enjoy the books. I write what I want to read. Lucky for me, lots of other people want to read it, too.
But I am also writing to make sense of my world. So different from Anita’s, but her world helps me think about ours more clearly. It may take me years after I’ve written something to understand why I wrote a particular book. Then one day it will dawn on me, and I’ll think, oh, that