I do not drink...whine.

I saw where IFC is putting together their first film production, which will be based on Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series.

This is all well and good, but they’re only going to be able to film the first four or five out of the sixteen that are in the series, because they go from Urban Mythology/Chick-Lit Horror straight to S&M porn. Seriously.

Several of my friends were reading the series along with me, and I actually made it further than they did. All the sex was getting very distracting, but Hamilton kept introducing interesting ideas on the paranormal side, like the gestational period for lycanthropes (it depends on what flavor animal you are), and I wanted to see how she developed them.

That all ended with the last one I read…Harlequin, maybe? No lie, the first five pages have a light sprinkling of plot, and are followed by twenty-five pages of porn. I stopped reading after the first few pages and just started skimming, waiting for the actual story to start, but I got fed up with it and quit.

If these books are available on Kindle, I’d expect a wakka-cha-waah-waah soundtrack to play along. As one of my friends put it:

“I won’t read another one unless the title of the damn thing is Contains No Porn.”

It’s kind of a shame. Hamilton isn’t the best writer, but she’s not the worst by any stretch, and her world was a fun place to explore for a while. Anita was an interesting character. She had her faults, but she also had her code. As she’s overcome her faults, she’s also whittled away at her code, and now she’s just a supra-natural slut who’s boring and complains too much.

Obviously, the whole vampire mystique is based on sex. True Blood had sex, Dracula had sex, The Lost Boys had a Rob Lowe poster in a teenaged boy’s closet (!), Lifeforce had sex – it’s nothing new. But when the focus of your novels goes from “Which monster do I need to take out first?” to “Which monster do I want to take me first?”, you’re no longer writing Horror.