The Gospel According to Anita Blake: A Conversation with Laurell K. Hamilton

In Dead Ice, Anita continues her transformative journey of self-discovery when—in the midst of dealing with the complexities of her engagement to Jean-Claude—she is tasked with solving one of her most disturbing cases yet: someone is reanimating the dead in order to produce zombie porn, essentially forcing the undead to engage in sex in front of the cameras. The case compels Anita to reexamine her own precarious place in the world, leading to arguably the most allegorically profound Blake novel yet.
We tracked down Hamilton as she prepares to embark on the Dead Ice book tour (beginning June 9 in Atlanta) for a characteristically frank discussion…
Laurell. So we meet again! I think this is the sixth or seventh time I’ve interviewed you and every chat we’ve had has turned out to be revelatory in some way. Let’s get to it then. Your Anita Blake novels have been causing controversy for decades—I’ve heard more than a few readers call your saga “supernatural porn”—but, in all honesty, I’ve never understood it.
Erotic fiction has been booming for years. Homogenized BDSM storylines are being embraced and consumed by the masses (Fifty Shades of Grey), yet Anita Blake remains a lightning rod for haters. The only thing I can attribute this to is Anita’s polyamorous nature—which, again, is so bizarre to me because LGBT is one of the fastest growing and most dynamic categories in genre fiction.
Even in the LGBT community, polyamory and bisexuality are not totally accepted. They are both seen as a way of not committing to one sexuality, or one person, even among those who you would think would be the most accepting. Most people, regardless of their sexual orientation, are very invested in the ideal of finding the love of their life and living happily ever after. It works for some people, but happily ever after is from fairy tales, which are bedtime stories for kids. Why does everyone try to fit real world love into a model from children’s stories? Shouldn’t true love be able to grow up, at last?
When I had Anita Blake not choose one of her two original suitors and ride off into the sunset, you’d think I dumped people’s real life brother, their favorite brother. Worse yet, the timing was terrible because the book that offended the monogamous normative majority was the one I was touring for when I brought my new husband, Jonathon, out with me for the very first time. I hadn’t shared the dissolution of my first marriage online. It had never occurred to me that it was anyone’s business; what I badly misunderstood was that some readers weren’t just invested in my fiction, but in me, or who they thought I was from interviews, blogs, and my online presence. They were invested not just in Anita’s love life, but in mine, something I did not understand at all.
I was married to my college sweetheart, had a child, was supposed to be a soccer mom, normal and middle American as apple pie. Then I showed up divorced from not only my husband, but from the life that some fans had built for me in their imaginations. Not only had I s*** on their happily ever after in my fiction, but in my real life. I’ve been divorced for over a decade, and happily married to Jonathon for most of that time, but there are still fans that hate on me for it. I know male writers that are in the process of a divorce that aren’t getting as much grief currently as I’m still getting from an event that happened long ago. So part of the haters’ issues have to be gender based, though I don’t understand the bias, I’ve been on the receiving end of it too long not to believe it’s real.
What part has the internet and/or social media played in all this?
I learned some valuable lessons about dealing with the online world, the fans, and the trolls. First, give some information out, because if you surprise people too badly they feel strangely betrayed and some of them will not forgive the slight—ever, and I mean ever. I’ve struggled to find a balance between sharing enough so people feel included, but not so much that it’s too much. Do I have the perfect mix between the two? Probably not, but it’s better than it was because complete silence encourages people to make things up.
On the internet, speculation among haters can get repeated so much that it comes back around to the positive fans as truth, all without any benefit of my real life being involved. Sometimes I don’t even know what’s being said online until I get a question from a fan, asked as if a complete fiction, or even a spiteful lie, is gospel truth. Often the person asking the question is totally innocent, just repeating what they’ve seen on the internet, because if it’s online long enough in enough places, it’s gotta be true—right?
The main reason I blogged about the other couple that we live with, our other halves Genevieve and Spike, was that I knew giving out a little truth would save trouble later. The names are Nom de plumes and Spike especially prefers to be very private, which I’ve told the fans. Most are being very nice about that and respecting the boundaries, because I told them and kept them in the loop. Almost all the personal information I share online is either because I think it might be helpful to other people or I don’t want the fans to feel betrayed again by some huge disparity between my real life and the life they have built up for me in their heads.

I’ve been saying for the last 15 or so years that you are a pioneer. The Anita Blake saga was the very first series to blend elements from a diversity of genre fiction categories (horror, fantasy, romance, mystery) to succeed commercially. When Obsidian Butterfly, the first Anita Blake novel released in hardcover, hit on January 1, 2000, the sales were phenomenal. Its success irrevocably changed the genre fiction landscape.
But it took you so long to get to that point. When you wrote Guilty Pleasures back in the late ‘80s, and early ‘90’s, you had incredible difficulty finding a publisher, as I recall. The storyline was ahead of its time—but now comparable stories are commonplace. I think in many ways Anita is a pioneer and trailblazer as well—since 1993, the public attitudes have changed dramatically to reflect greater acceptance of a range of sexual identities. Have you ever thought of Anita (and her open-mindedness) in that light? As an iconic character whose adventures not only entertain but enlighten as well?
I didn’t think of her that way when I started writing the series. Honestly, if someone had told me that Anita would go from very conservative, pretty much celibate by choice, to someone who was comfortable dating multiple partners, some of which are women, I’d have never believed them. So, I obviously didn’t set out to blaze any trails in sexual orientation in literature.
The beginning of it, I think, was that I do my research very thoroughly, and that meant that when the character of Nathaniel came on stage I researched BDSM the same way I’d researched firearms, police work, voodoo, vampires, and wereanimals. I treat everything in my books with the same level of respect, which a lot of writers don’t seem to do. Lack of research always shows on the page and the writing suffers. It’s like they don’t believe BDSM deserves the same level of care that other topics do. They treat it like it’s the freak show and you can make up anything. I went to BDSM clubs with people from the local community. I have never used anything I saw in a club in the books, because one of the rules is that you don’t tell details outside of the events. It’s a privacy and, again, respect issue. People are letting you see wonderful and sometimes very intimate things, it’s a gift, and you treat it as such, if you don’t, then you don’t understand the real heart of BDSM.
With everyone’s knowledge and permission I interviewed people in the community so I would get things right, but again I never used any specifics in the books, I researched it almost exactly the way I had guns years before. Read about it, then find experts, ask good questions, and do reasonable hands on, because you always learn more that way. I’d only shot two guns in my life when I started writing Anita, and I’ve had cops, military, and gun lovers of all kinds compliment my gun facts. I did the BDSM with the same level of care. This was years before I realized that bondage was a part of my own sexuality, so I was starting from scratch.
But once people started telling me that I was writing about topics that weren’t normally portrayed, it made me think, “Why isn’t this shown in literature more often?” Fiction is one of the ways we build our society and ourselves. The more people told me I couldn’t write about certain themes, the more I questioned it and decided to push the envelope. As long as everyone is consenting adults, sex is a good and positive thing, and I write it that way as much as I can. I live my life that way, too. I’m not sure I’m sex positive, so much as I’m just positive in general and I simply don’t differentiate between sex and any other part of life; which seems to be at odds with the way most people view it. We talk about our sex life like it’s separate from the rest of our lives and for me it’s just part of the energy that makes our lives whole and happy.
Dead Ice is a great example of that enlightenment cloaked in literary escapism. If you look at the storyline allegorically, it’s filled with—let’s call it—existential illumination. A rogue necromancer is essentially reanimating zombies and using them as unwilling participants in zombie porn.
The question raised is a fascinating one: do these people—essentially corpses that have had their souls returned to them—have rights? Do we kill them, fear them, hate them because of their situation? I loved the scene where Anita, looking for a wayward zombie she has raised, goes into a Denny’s and finds him happily consuming not brains but a sizzling skillet breakfast! Are the zombies in Dead Ice an allegorical statement or am I, once again, reading way too much into it?
I did get the chance to explore hard questions. What is life? What is death? As the vampires and shapeshifters in Anita’s world have gotten more rights as citizens, the zombies have been left behind. Now most of them are just reanimated corpses, just meat puppets shambling at the necromancer’s will, but Anita and a few others, like the bad guy in this book, are capable of raising much more. The zombie that ends up having breakfast at Denny’s is so lifelike that it frightens Anita. What has she done? If the zombie is “alive” then what is it, what is he? It raises all those questions of being the other, treated as not human, not real, not worthy, but who gets to make that decision. Who decides what human is, and what it isn’t? Who deserves to make that call?
I’ve seen your Anita Blake books shelved in horror, fantasy, romance, and mystery. Maybe categorizing the saga as philosophy could open you up to a new audience! In all seriousness though, these novels are so full of wisdom, both existential and spiritual. That’s what makes the “supernatural porn” references so irritating—this series is so much more than porn.
Anita is in the midst of a transformative journey of self-discovery and I’d like to think that more than a few readers are as well. I can imagine that writing these novels has allowed you to grow as much as Anita. How is the Laurell of 2015 different from the Laurel of 1993?
[laughs] I didn’t set out to be a philosopher, but as a thinking human being, it’s hard to avoid it. For every hater there are hundreds of positive, happy fans, and among them I am amazed at how much impact my fiction has had on their real lives. I’ve now lost count of the number of women that have told me they left abusive relationships because they knew Anita wouldn’t take it.
Women and men tell me that Anita and other characters in the books have taught them how to be brave, and stronger. Nathaniel has been particularly helpful to a lot of readers who see his road from addict and victim to the happy, healthy, person he is today as hope that they can do the same. I’ve had numerous people tell me they’ve gone to therapy because I talk about Nathaniel’s therapy and other characters getting help through counseling. How wonderful is that? My fictional characters are helping real people get better.
How have I changed? Writing Anita Blake and her world has led me to research things I’d have never known about. Would I have embraced my own kinky side if I hadn’t first researched it for Nathaniel? I think so, but that was my first hint that my subconscious was often ahead of the front of my head. My muse leading me where I needed to go, just like researching the Wiccan faith for the Meredith Gentry series would help lead me to leave the Church and become Wiccan myself. I explored poly on paper long before I even knew there was a word for having multiple romantic partners.
As I’ve talked more openly about being poly I’m hearing from more and more people who are embracing non-monogamy of some kind. If monogamy works for you, great, but with the divorce rate in this country at an all time high, I think talking about alternatives is a good thing. Maybe it will help us come up with a relationship model that works better in real life, not just on paper. I know that my second marriage has been poly from the beginning and it works for us. Laurell of 1993 was Episcopalian, married and monogamous with the man she lost her virginity to on her honeymoon, and who she planned to spend the rest of her life with.
Me in 2015—Wiccan, married, polyamorous, lived with my husband before marriage to make sure we could live together before I walked down the aisle. Jonathon and I are living with another couple in a poly foursome, and the balance of us together works amazingly well. If you’d asked me that this would be my domestic arrangement in 1993, I’d have thought you’d lost your ever loving mind.
This series isn’t easily categorized—neither is its heroine. The plotlines are often intricate, the characters are multi-dimensional, the relationships are at times mind-bogglingly complex. It would’ve been so easy to write a storyline that is easily processed and doesn’t push readers out of their comfort zones. I applaud you—and thank you—for continuing to challenge your readers and for writing the story that you want to write. Anita said it best in Dead Ice: “Life is just full of new experiences…”
I haven’t seen my comfort zone in over ten years, but I’ve never been happier. The gift of being uncomfortable and having to think about your life, what you want, what makes you happy, who you are, who you want to be—these are important questions. If my fiction helps people look at all that and more, then I’ve done my job. Fiction should make your world bigger, your brain think differently, and your emotions do a roller coaster, all while it entertains the hell out of you.
 Dead Ice is available June 9.