ut first, let me just point to the Navigation menu box to the left, where I’ve put links to some of my fiction. *points* Not all of it is nice stuff. Little Girls in particular is on the gruesome and squicky side.
     Here There Be Spoilers. You’ve Been Warned.
     So, I’m in Wal-Mart the other night, and I’d finished my grocery shopping and wheeled my cart up to the check-out lanes. There I discovered a line of epic proportions with one frazzled cashier, and the lead customers were two women with two carts heaping full of groceries. Clearly, I had a wait ahead of me.
     So, despite knowing that if I went to look at the books, I would end up buying one, I wandered over to the books for a browse. I wheeled my happy little cart down the first aisle of the Wal-Mart book section, which happens to be the romance section. Not really my cup of tea, and I meant to stroll on through to the popular fiction when a gold cover caught my eye. I glanced at it again, seeing the author’s name blazed across the front.
     Laurell K. Hamilton. It was the newest Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novel, The Harlequin.
     In the romance section.
     Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
     Seriously, y’all. I remember back in the day when MrJames handed me the first Anita Blake book. He said, “You’ll love this. The gal’s a necromancer. She shoots the shit out of everything. She’s badass.” Or words to that general effect. Man, we loved those first five or six books. Anita was bad. She rocked.
     And then she started fucking everything in the book.
     Since then, my opinion of the series had declined drastically. I mean, I could sort of over-look the fact that we had a necromancer who never did any necromancy. Here’s Anita Blake, most powerful necromancer on Earth, and in sixteen books, we’ve had one, count ‘em, one zombie horde. I mean, really, if I were a necromancer, I’d be raising zombie hordes just to accompany me to the grocery store. There’s a fight? Zombie horde. Some bad guy is giving you shit? Zombie horde. Trying to be intimidating for the other vampire Masters? Zombie horde. The werewolves are copping an attitude? Zombie fucking horde. It’s the answer to all your problems.
     Just for comparison, when Harry Dresden did necromancy, we got a goddamn undead T Rex. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s how you do some fucking necromancy!
     But since then . . . we hardly ever hear about the necromancy. Instead, it’s about the arduer all the time. Lady, if you want to write about a succubus, that’s fine, but stop calling the bitch a necromancer. Is that too much to ask?
     It was with a certain amount of disgust, and a big ol’ side of trepidation, that I selected The Harlequin as the book I was going to blow my seven bucks on. I thought to myself, But man, the last few of these have sucked. Do I really want to waste my precious extra seven bucks on a suckfest? (Quite possibly, literally. These books are increasingly smut-heavy.) But I bought it. I was bitching about the books at work the other day, and my servers asked me, “Then why do you buy them?”
     ”Dude.” I answered, holding the book up. “Smut. Hello?” I went on to explain that the Anita Blake books are like having a big bag of chocolate chip cookies sitting out in front of you. You’ve already eaten half the bag, and you’re actually starting to feel a little sick from all the sugar, but that goddamn bag is just sitting there, open, in front of you, and you just keep stuffing your face because, dammit, it’s chocolate chip cookies. The Anita Blake books are like that. You don’t actually want anymore, and you’re starting to feel a little nauseous, but they’re right there. You can’t stop.
     Anyway, there’s some good news. Edward is back in this book, and Olaf shows up. You remember Olaf as the serial killer with a crush on Anita, from Obsidian Butterfly, the last book worth a shit in the series. Edward you remember as Death, Anita’s go-to guy for guns and mayhem. The bad guys, the Harlequin, are actually pretty cool, and they do some really neat shit. I mean, harlequins have kind of been done to death, but this was a pretty original use of the concept, and I liked it quite a lot. And ladies and gentlemen, we have plot! I am not kidding. There was hardly any smut at all! There was an actual plot! And it wasn’t bad! I nearly pooped myself!
     There still weren’t any zombie hordes. But there was plot! And guns! And mayhem! And only, like, two or three sex scenes, and they were mercifully short, not chapters and chapters long. Holy crap, friends and neighbors, there was a goddamn story in there.
     To be perfectly fair, the story itself could have used a little work. Hamilton had to hand us a few mulligans to get the story rolling again after a certain character wandered in a fucked things up, and the ending could have been a little better, but I’m totally willing to overlook these flaws, because goddammit, the old girl tried for us. She really tried.
     Except . . .
     There was Richard.
     Oh, migawd, I hate this character more every time I see him. Seriously people, we need to get a petition together or something, begging Laurell to kill that sorry motherfucker off. I can’t take him any more. I just can’t. He’s fucking everything up, he’s completely pissing useless, and he’s so goddamn annoying. He has to go. Every time he wandered into a chapter, he fucked it up. He’s gotta go.
     MrJames suggests that we somehow transfer Anita’s affinity to leopards to Jean Claude, and make that his animal to call instead of the wolves. Then they can finish off the triumvirate with Micah, and Richard can go quietly off into the night and shoot himself in the head or something. Then MrJames took the idea back, because frankly, knowing Richard, he’d fuck up suicide and we’d be stuck with the werewolf version of Arseface from the Preacher comics. And Anita would still throw him a pity-fuck, and we’d have to read it.
     Let’s review the character of Richard Zeeman. Let me explain why I hate this fucking character with such a terrible and wrathful passion.
     Here we have a man who is described on a regular basis as the kind of drop-dead gorgeous that makes other straight men go, “Hey, I might jump the fence for that.” He’s a fantastic sculpture of male beauty, and according to Anita, he’s hung like a horse. He has a loving and wonderful family that put him through college so he can make good money working at a job that he loves. He owns a nice home out in the country, he drives a nice car, and beautiful women are throwing the pussy at him. Not only that, but he gets a regular turn at nailing Anita Blake, who is apparently the golden lay. Granted, he’s a werewolf, and a convincing argument could be made concerning the suck factor of that circumstance. But, he got lucky in the genetic jackpot and ended up being the uber alpha werewolf, and not only runs the local werewolf pack, but could pretty much pwn any other werewolf alpha who came along. So, if you have to have some shit luck, that’s the way to have it.
     Despite all this, the man pisses and moans and bitches and whines fucking endlessly about how much his life sucks. Seriously, is there a male anywhere reading this post who would not sign up for one day of Richard’s life? Where do I get in line for this? This man has it all, and all he does is bitch about it! Oh, the horror. Oh, the angst. Oh, give me a goddamn break. He’s in therapy! Therapy, for fucksake, because his goddamn life sucks so much. If this character were a real person, I would break my hand, I’d be slapping the shit out of him so often.
     You! Richard Zeeman! Out of my lifeboat! You’re weighing the rest of us down!
     This man needs to grow some sack, and with a quickness. If this character stays, we need to get him an epiphany on the order of magnitude of a supernova, and have something happen that causes him to get his shit together, because with all due honesty, he’s so crippled, whiny, and useless, that he’s actively fucking the story up. Every time he wandered into a chapter, he bogged it down, and not in any kind of a good way. I can’t imagine I’m the only person out there who feels this way about this character. I can’t imagine at this point that any of us can stand him for any length of time. I mean, sure, as a writer you need a character with a few issues. Inner conflict can really drive a story when it’s done right. I’ve seen it done right hundreds of times. This isn’t being done right. I can’t have any sympathy for this character, because he’s got everything so good, and all he does is bitch about it.
     In the end, were it not for Richard’s influence, I would have rated this book at a nice, solid three stars. It would have been a decent read. With Richard in it, I’ve got to drop it to a one. Congrats, Richie. You ruined an otherwise good book.

     (Photo credit: FantasticFiction.com.)

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