I’m a little bit pissed off right now. After reading 500 pages of porn broken up by less than 100 pages of plot, I’ve been relishing the degree to which I’ll at least be able to savage Incubus Dreams, since I insisted on putting myself through it. I want to be perfectly clear that I’m not exaggerating. The first four-fifths of the book had a smidgen of plot, but mostly it had a parade of discrete situations, unhampered by any particular connection to the plot of the book or even the over-arching plot of the series except in the broadest of terms. Anita Blake faces up to a personal problem with one or more of her relationships. Or, Anita Blake has a metaphysical crisis to resolve, related to her powers and the cost that accompanies them (or more rarely to vampire politics). Or, Anita Blake gains new, untested powers and isn’t quite sure how to handle the stress or use them properly. And each of these problems has a single solution, which is for Ms. (excuse me, Federal Marshal) Blake to have sex with anyone who happens to be at hand as the problem is experienced, preferably with more than one man at a time and preferably including some of the pain play or dominant-submissive dichotomies that she had never even heard of just four books ago.

Add to that the misspelling of “triumvirate” on such a consistent basis that it had to have been purposeful and the author’s continuous tic of having Anita think something and then say it aloud seconds later, with identical construction to the thought’s phrasing, and you can see where I was going to have myself a real head of steam built up. (Not to mention a tic new to this book where people are no longer aroused by something, or even more pedestrianly turned on by it. The only way to make reference to this phenomenon is that the act or thought being referred to “just flat does it for” whatever particular person is, er, flat done for.) I guess what I’m saying is that I had some real rage in me directed at this book, enough so that talking about it right now is dredging it all up again. Books this long do not normally take me three weeks to read, but there’s only so much of this crap at a time that a man can take.

But, despite all that I’ve said so far, that’s not what has me pissed off just now. Even though none of the dangling plot threads from the previous book were more than glancingly addressed here, and even though this book’s plot had somewhat more dangle than resolution its own self, the last 150 pages or so just flat did it for me. This is the Anita that keeps me reading these stupid books: clever and quippy, sensitive to her own emotions but able to get the job done, heading out into the night to kill the bad guys (a band of serial killers who are also vampires, this time) with extreme prejudice. There wasn’t quite as much mystery-solving as I’d like, but Anita the action hero is in her own way as entertaining as Anita the detective. And both of them are so, so much more entertaining than Anita the accidental ho.

So, am I pissed that I ended up having to say some nice things about the book? Why, yes. But that’s not the biggest problem. What pisses me off more than anything is that I had nearly broken free of the series.