LikeMarella Sands is a native St. Louisan and member of the writers group Alternate Historians (www.sff.net/people/marella). She earned degrees in anthropology from the University of Tulsa and Kent State University and currently teaches a class at Webster University on J.R.R. Tolkien. She has published both fiction and nonfiction. The author’s household includes the author, her husband, a multitude of pet rats, and four cats.
On the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series
Bon Rapports
By Marella Sands
6 Comments
It’s an old and well-used maxim that you gotta start with a joke. With that in mind, I’d like to tell you about the time Ms. Hamilton announced that she would never, ever write a sex scene. It was an ironclad rule: No Sex On Stage.
That’s right. No sex for Anita. Ever. At least, not in front of her readers.
Stop laughing. I can hear you from here, you know. Honest, she really said that. And with a long tradition of sexy but not sexual vampires in the literature, there was no reason to suspect at the time that Anita would ever be sleeping with the undead, except possibly in a purely literal fashion.
Sure, the phrase sleep with to mean sexual intercourse has been servicing the law, and authors, since at least the tenth century. But as late as the nineteenth century, while everyone and his dog were probably humping everything in sight (though, we hope, not each other), no one was going to talk about it. Even though humping as an alternative to sleep with had evolved by the late 1700s (servicing was even older than that) and was clearly available, titillating readers rather than thrusting sex in their faces was the order of the day.
Call it the age of coyness, at least ideally. John Polidori, the first to mingle vampires and noblemen, wrote that his vampire, Lord Ruthven, in the story “The Vampyre: A Tale,” seduced women so that they were “hurled from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue, …
About Marella Sands
6 Comments On "Bon Rapports"
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at 8:53 pm
Well said. You are well read and therefore slightly over my head but still, well said.
at 10:02 am
I’ve liked LH enough to buy all her books, but it’s OD time here. With the first books it was the classic twist I enjoyed: Spiritual Girl with Anger issues. I could relate, especially now, given the current fiasco in Rome. Anita tried to manage it all — the Virgin v Whore myth, the Killer v Healer myth, even taking on that old conundrum — working outside the home for a decent wage. Now, I’m less enthusiastic, because the trajectory seems to climb over the thicker things on the floor to the thicker things in the glory hole to even thicker things like goddessing/undeading/unchanging animaling.
The things we imaging are what eventually come to be, and I’d like to see LH turn that awesome imagination and courage toward a really cool myth for women that will live on the way Mary Shelley’s did.
at 12:43 am
Well written/said I agree, though I do miss the first books, I do have to say they were my favorite…. Yet, I still find myself wondering what is going to happen next… I’m waiting for a new book… eh hum wink wink… Im the person that orders months in advanced, waits impatiently ( I need to know what is ganna happen next!!!), gets it, read its in a few days, and yerns for more…. Even though Im sad that more and more men seem to make it too her bed, I can’t help but wonder will she still love her first few men, or in the end will she just choose one? Oh, and will she ever have to face Edward? In a way it would be cool if she had to choose someone to marry in order to keep them safe…. Who would she choose if she had to? Oh, Im getting off track… The way she writes is amazing… there are times I think I have seen the movie only to realize that there was no movie, I just seen it in my head that way because of the amazing attention to detail…
at 10:37 am
Tabitha S. obviously missed the point of Ms. Sands essay. Or it is, perhaps, fervant readers of LKH’s more recent novels that Ms. Sands is making a point of?
The romantic/sexual descriptions in The Killing Dance compared with say, Danse Macabre, Incubus Dreams, (and the book in which she has sex with Nathaniel in his LEOPARD form…) are sharply in contrast with each other. In the first is minimal crudeness, more romance and the anticipation of waiting for just that very scene. In the second, is a group orgy scene in every book at least once, which will NEVER be romantic, and if that ceases to be shocking enough, how about some homoerotic sex scenes? Or beastiality?
Whether LKH changed her modus operandi so dramatically from Mystery/Horror/Romance to Porn/Horror/??? because her readers demanded more and more to get hot and bothered, as Ms. Sands seems to indicate, or because she ran out of material for the series to continue with actual plots, I can’t say. But after reading her latest Anita book, Flirt, (which is a 200 page sex scene with a stranger, and has a pompous unfunny COMIC STRIP at the end) it can remain a mystery until the end of time for all I care. It is one I have,(better late than never),chosen to stop trying to solve.
at 11:25 am
Stacie, I agree with you that there’s definitely a difference between the sex scenes in Killing Dance vs more recent titles, though I’m not sure that difference is in the type of language used so much as it is in what that language is being used to describe– so I’d say Marella’s point still stands, no?
I do have to say:
“which will NEVER be romantic”
Maybe it would never be romantic for you, which I absolutely respect, but that doesn’t mean other people wouldn’t find it romantic– so long as an act is consensual, it seems to me that there’s *potential* for romance. Romance strike me much more as the result of what’s going on with two people emotionally, not what they’re doing physically.
at 6:06 pm
Can I just say that whatever you think of AB or LKH, this was just a brilliantly written essay – I laughed out loud. What a pleasure to read something that is joyfully written. (And PS – just finished Carmilla on Kindle – if you want to gush on just barely buried lesbianism, go for it!