Guilty Pleasures (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter)

Content warning for the novel: rats and wererats
I mean, and vampires. But they ar on the cover.

It’s a sort-of OK vampire story, but the writing is bad.¹
I wanted to give this ★★★☆☆, but the bad bits, small and large, kept coming.

One of the plot holes is a literal hole. Pro tip: Make sure you really control all accesses to your torture camber. Don’t rely on wererats you don’t 100% control and the inaccessibility of caves to keep people out of your lair.

Hamilton often says the same thing twice. “If I hadn’t known better, I would have said it (the sound of her heels) sounded like I was running.” Got it. Yu were running but want to pretend yu were not. That is actually decent writing. “I was not running. I was just walking very fast.” Yeah, yu said that in the sentence before. No need to repeat that.

Lots of other bits that just read a bit off:
“(T)he pine scent of rosemary” Odd. I would hav said rosemary had a rosemary sent, not a pine sent.
“The offices were marked with a little sign that said ‘Office.’ How clever.” Yes. Labeling doors is very usef… Oh. You meant that sarcastically. Why? Why mock labeled doors?

At some point we got fat fobia thrown in for no reason at all. Basically “look, this woman thinks she is sexy but she is fat. Ha ha. A fat person thinking she could be sexy. It’s funny because she doesn’t realize that that’s impossible.”

This is bitlit from before bitlit was cool (1993. That's even way before Buffy) and it's pretty cool, actually. Vampires and other supernatural creatures exist, are more or less integrated in the society (less than more, shall we say), and the heroin, Anita Blake, raises the dead for a living (pun... half intended). She also gets hired to investigate a series of vampire murders - which is kind of ironical considering that she did kill a few vampires of her own. Obviously, the most powerful vampires of the town are more or less involved in all of that, and make Anita's life... difficult, to say the least. It was a pretty enjoyable book - funny and easily read. I'm a bit dubious on the rest of the series - from what I read over the intarwebz, it gets pretty bad pretty fast - but then vampire series, even the bad ones, could be considered a guilty pleasure of mine, so maybe I'll get tempted ;)