Laurell Kaye Hamilton was born on 19 February 1963. Her birth name was Klein. She grew up in Sims, Indiana. She earned degrees in English and biology at Marion College, now Indiana Wesleyan University, an evangelical private liberal-arts college. She met her first husband, Gary Hamilton, there. They have a daughter, Trinity. In 2001 she married Jonathon Green, and she lives in St. Louis County, Missouri. She supports animal charities, especially dog rescue and wolf preservation. The fictional St. Louis in her books is not a random city. She put the bureaucracy of the undead on Midwestern streets she knows.
She is best known for two long series that put monsters, politics, and increasingly explicit erotic power exchange in the same books. The Anita Blake series includes novels, short fiction, and comics. Anita is a professional zombie raiser, a vampire executioner, and a police consultant. In that world the undead have partial civil rights. More than six million copies of the series have been printed. USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, and Time have treated Hamilton as one of the main builders of modern urban fantasy. For readers who pay attention to kink, the later Anita books are a record of multiple partners, compulsion driven by the ardeur, and group sex used as the engine of the plot. She is not teaching you how to tie rope safely. Magic and wanting people are what move the story.
Anita’s story starts in that fictional St. Louis. The early books lean crime-noir and procedural, and they worry about the moral line when you kill undead who still hold something close to human status. By November 2013 the series had 22 novels and five novellas, and several of them hit the New York Times list. Comics adapted Guilty Pleasures, The Laughing Corpse, Circus of the Damned, and a prologue special, The First Death. Later, Anita becomes a U.S. Marshal, and the weight of the story shifts toward the supernatural.
Anita is infected with the ardeur, a supernatural hunger her vampire master, Jean-Claude, gave her by accident. It gives her power. It also requires frequent sex with multiple partners every day, sometimes in a group. It is a plot device, and it forces the practical mess of multiple partners, how jealousy gets handled, and whether magical compulsion can count as free consent. Reader reaction sharpened after Narcissus in Chains. Some fans took the sex as the natural next step in Anita’s metaphysical bonds with vampires and wereleopards. Others said she spent too long obsessing over whether she was a slut, or that sexual-abuse themes crowded out the mystery. Hamilton answered online in a post called “Dear Negative Reader”: life is short, so stop reading books you do not like. She suggested that some of the loud critics were reading in private, or were only passing on someone else’s opinion. The post drew more backlash.
Reviews split the same way once the sex got heavier. In 2006 the Boston Globe, on Micah, said that for readers who wanted romance rather than erotica, the sex was dull and irritating. The Kansas City Star, on the fourteenth book, said that after thirteen charged books the eroticism had become “mere description.” Publishers Weekly found a growing dreariness in Blood Noir, with sex replacing plot and character. The Denver Post, on Danse Macabre, said mystery readers might leave unsatisfied, and that for years the series’ main draw had been its erotic novelty. Few mainstream novels go that far into plain, uncut erotica. On awards: Bloody Bones (1996) was nominated for an International Horror Guild novel award, A Kiss of Shadows (2001) for a Locus fantasy award, and Hit List (2011), Kiss the Dead (2012), and Affliction (2013) for Goodreads Choice paranormal fantasy awards.
The Merry Gentry series centers on Meredith “Merry” Gentry, a princess of Faerie working as a private investigator in a world that already knows the fey exist. She deals with assassination attempts, court intrigue, and highly sexual magical-political alliances. By 2014 there were nine novels. Where later Anita is under vampire metaphysical compulsion, Merry’s books stay on heat, fertility politics, and sidhe power bargains, with sex used as statecraft. John Lennard wrote about Merry’s “improbable code of orgasm,” treating the sex as a structural code of the genre, past the job of selling the book. Courtney Allison Moulton and Kelly Gay are among the writers who have said she influenced them. In 2008 Time said the genre’s popularity “owes everything to Laurell K. Hamilton.” The commercial path she made ordinary — supernatural investigator, romance heat, and a mythos that keeps expanding — became the template for a lot of the books that later sat next to hers. She has said in public that graphic sex is part of the work, not an optional seasoning.
