Ardeur

One doesn’t have to precisely blame Laurell K. Hamilton for the explosion of paranormal romance and kickass-chick urban fantasy currently filling bookstore shelves. Hamilton started out, a decade or so ago in Guilty Pleasures, with the same type of urban-fantasy-with-a-touch-of-noir that has been a small, important subsection of fantasy ever since someone first decided to cross a detective story with something supernatural. From Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker (Dracula is, after all, a detective story as well as a psychosexual morality play) to Charles de Lint and Simon Green, the supernatural detective is alive and well—for which I am profoundly grateful.

What separated Anita Blake, Vampire Executioner, from the common run of schlock and fantasy was two things: Anita’s gender and Anita’s ambiguity. I don’t think I’m far wrong in stating that Anita was one of the very first “kickass” female characters in urban fantasy, a template for all those ladies with tramp-stamp tattoos and tight clothing hanging out on so many covers nowadays. However, she was not the first, and her popularity has its roots in a different dynamic: the fact that Anita Blake is one of the first female protagonists with the noir hallmark of moral and ethical ambiguity guiding her actions.

The phenomenon I refer to as “ambiguous Anita” only shows up in the first five books of the series. By the sixth she is embroiled in a process of becoming a more standard female character, whose primary concern is her interpersonal relationships with the monsters she is embroiled with sexually. This is where Anita loses significant amounts of her noir-ish features: ethical/moral flexibility, dilemmas with no clear “winning” outcome, and a significant amount of cruelty and ruthlessness our culture is exceedingly uncomfortable with females displaying. Until that sixth book, Anita is a character who wouldn’t be out of place in a souped-up Sam Spade world, with all its undercurrents of cruelty, perversion, weariness (not to mention situational ethics driven by need instead of love), and violence.

When discussing Anita and “strong female characters,” Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer often comes up. There is a critical difference between Buffy and Anita, and it’s not just the age divide. Buffy Summers, for all her strength, power, and snappy dialogue, is basically a passive recipient of a talent that forces her to fight darkness. The Buffy cycle derives most of its narrative drive from constantly exploiting the tension between those powers and Buffy’s oft-expressed and central desire to be a “normal” teenager instead of a reluctant freak. While this may be an excellent vehicle for exploring female teen sexuality and the frightening charge of sex and foreign adult responsibility every young girl faces in the process of maturing, Buffy is still essentially passive, and eternally on the cusp of adulthood.

Anita, however, is introduced to us as a full-fledged adult, however emotionally stunted. She is an active recipient of her powers, trained in their use from childhood by her grandmother and displaying surprisingly little angst over them. In fact, Anita’s powers are how she earns her adult living. They place her in the role of judge, jury, and executioner; whereas Buffy is no more, when all is said and done, than a supernatural cockroach exterminator.

Buffy has a clear-cut mission—rid the world of Evil. You bet. But Anita is caught weighing the cost of each action, asking which evil is the one that really needs to be eliminated. This is a question our culture is exceedingly uncomfortable with a woman solving openly and physically, despite the fact that adult women (just like adult men) weigh relative and shifting factors of risk, consequence, and responsibility as a matter of course.

While Anita’s gender does not make her special per se, the combination of her gender and the moral and ethical ambiguity of her character, especially when it comes to the use of violence, makes her groundbreaking in the first four books of the series. All strides in feminism aside, girls are still supposed to be soft, feminine, nurturing, passive recipients of male action. Films, books, television, ads, magazines—the stew of visual and auditory media we’re simmering in holds the assumption of female passivity to be self-evident and therefore a foundation to build our whole worldview on. Women are steeped in unconscious cultural expectations from the cradle—it’s rude to run and yell, even if we’re running from a rapist/murderer/ stalker/etc. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard a female victim of crime say, “I knew something was wrong . . . but I didn’t want to be rude.”

Anita aims her Browning right into the heart of that dynamic and keeps firing and reloading. She decides who lives and who dies, and she doesn’t give a fig for being rude when her survival is on the line. In the first four books, a constant theme is Anita’s extralegal status—she chooses which vampires/monsters die, and (here’s the important bit) she feels far less horror and guilt over it than society tells women they ought to feel. She feels guilt over her lack of guilt, yes, but instead of seeming shallow, those protestations add complexity to her personality.

Anita’s relationships with males are all marked by this ambiguity. There is Dolph, the standard “abrasive buddy,” whose main purpose seems to be highlighting that Anita is an anomaly. Dolph’s tamped-down professional appearance shouts that he is the image of the Good Man whose proper place it is to be the active part in their partnership, and his friction with Anita comes when Anita is either most “active” in deciding who lives and dies—or when Anita betrays her stated purpose of policing the monsters and starts considering sleeping with them.

A more problematic relationship is Anita’s interaction with Richard the werewolf. Unfortunately, the point at which Anita starts dating him is when a large bit of Anita’s fascinating ambiguity and tension begins draining away, like Moonlighting after Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd’s characters started bumping uglies. The chemistry and tension that had sustained their relationship vanished, and so did the show’s quality. Once Anita starts on the slippery slope of dating monsters instead of killing them, large chunks of her psychological complexity are struck off the map.

However, the main problem with Anita and Richard isn’t even their relationship—it’s Richard’s inability to deal with Anita’s moral and ethical flexibility. If Dolph is the Good Man, Richard is that Freudian monster the Emasculated Boyfriend, the male fear that strong females will somehow detract from their (apparently finite) stores of masculinity.

This could have added complexity instead of detracting it. As one fellow Anita reader so memorably put it to me, “Richard turns into a whiny passive-aggressive little bitch.” Which neatly encapsulates several issues—the pejorative nature of the term “bitch,” for one, and the male response to ambiguous and powerful females, for another.

Balanced against Richard’s emasculation is the über-perfect Jean-Claude and his relationship with Anita, in some ways the most treacherous of the lot. Jean-Claude is supernally beautiful, powerful, and sexual, a dark creature (in the first four to six novels) of ambiguity to match Anita’s own. It is a marriage made in Hell, however, because once Anita views him as a potential mate and not simply as a sexually threatening monster who doesn’t deserve murder yet, more of the narrative drive created by Anita’s vaunted ambiguity flies straight out the window.

The heart of this problem lies in the territory of sex. As long as there was merely the promise of sex between Anita and Jean-Claude, the uncertainty of their exact relationship—and the level of sexual threat to Anita’s psyche—could be exploited for maximum narrative tension. Once Jean-Claude becomes the paradigm of the perfect partner (sexual but nonthreatening in a procreative way, “dangerous” but not to the heroine), he becomes the Good Bad Boy instead of the Demon Lover, and the noir-erotic element of the Blake novels is passed over for the element of personal relationships, also known as the romance genre.

The romance genre is big business, fiction written by women for women. There are stringent conventions and expectations within the genre, from the happy ending to the dance of attraction. Romance both mirrors and subverts conversations about gender roles and expectations, but it does so using an overarching, slow-changing social narrative. The sources of dramatic tension are necessarily different; crossover between romance and noir is problematic because the two genres have wildly divergent aims, and because noir is necessarily outside the overarching social narrative the romance genre is working within. (One is not intrinsically more worthy or serious than the other, but they are different phyla, not to mention genus and species.) Even a writer who uses significant noir elements, like Anne Stuart, confines those elements to the male heroes and uses them in the context of that social narrative.

Anita Blake did not start out inside the romance narrative. The walloping of gender expectations fueled by our uncertainty over whether Anita is going to fuck Jean-Claude or kill him (a dynamic played out between every shifty dame and hardboiled gumshoe in damn near every noir tale) has muted in recent books into the playing-out of more socially conventional gender roles—whether or not Jean-Claude and Anita can communicate enough to “fix” their relationship. Likewise, our uncertainty over Jean-Claude’s behavior—whether or not he’s going to kill Anita or fuck her, once she lets her guard down—has moved out of the realm of ambiguity and into the realm of boyfriend-girlfriend.

Anita’s relationship with female figures is secondary to her relationship with males. The females in Anita Blake’s world are either standpoints of conventionality, serving as a Greek chorus to highlight social gender expectations (like Ronnie), or they are embodiments of the Dark Feminine without Anita’s redeeming qualities (for example, Nikolaos). Of all of these, two deserve particular attention: Ronnie and Raina.

While Anita is still ambiguous, Ronnie can be seen as Anita’s foot in the world of conventional gender expectations. Despite the hay made of Ronnie’s sexual behavior in the first books of the series, she is still a character we can find unthreatening. She completely lacks Anita’s edge of raw violent power, since she isn’t claiming the right of murder. Ronnie does not decide who lives or dies, so her sexual peccadilloes are not nearly as fascinating or threatening as Anita’s. Ronnie could be Anita’s alter ego, the “safe” woman Anita could have been if not for her talents and active pursuit of violence to even the scales.

In the beginning of the series, Anita has to a large extent chosen her career over sex, and Ronnie is conventionally (and actively) sexual in a way Anita cannot be if she hopes to remain a noir character. As long as Anita stayed in the territory of murderous ambiguity, which also meant remaining largely sexually uninterested, the friendship survived, as friendships of individuals with different but roughly equal social niches often do, with each partner bringing something to the table.

However, once Anita’s focus moved from noir ambiguity to personal relationships, Ronnie’s status as the voice of conventional gender interaction was compromised. The character’s response to this is twofold: Ronnie must become even more conventional (i.e., monogamous) to survive in the series and serve a purpose; and the element of jealousy and “traditional” feminine backstabbing is introduced to take the place of the early tension between Anita’s ethical gray areas and Ronnie’s espousal of more conventional values.

In other words, once Anita becomes sexually active in an “acceptable” or “normal” way—once her focus becomes the relationships with men in her life, even if there are rather a lot of them—she becomes not a friend to Ronnie but a rival, and their relationship takes on the tone of a formerly popular cheerleader versus the cheerleader who’s popular now.

The sadistic lycanthrope Raina suffers as well. As an embodiment of the destructive Dark Feminine, Raina is perhaps without equal in the Blake series, and her refusal to be a decent sport and go away when killed is one of the true flashes of subconscious genius on Hamilton’s part. Raina is unapologetically and unashamedly the castrating, child-eating female Freudians crawl under their beds in fear of. She is a twilit, liminal figure, built to show just how Anita as the protagonist is balanced on the threshold between light (“good,” conventional morality) and dark (Raina herself). Look, Raina says, you could end up like me. What stops you from ending up like me?

Unfortunately, the moral and ethical ambiguity of noir depends on that balancing act. The further a protagonist moves toward the light of convention, the more the dark recedes. The teeter-totter thumps down on one side, all tension keeping the two characters balanced is lost, and Raina, stranded in midair, becomes not a figure of terror but a postscript.

In any case, Anita’s primary relationships all through the series are with men. At first she defines herself in opposition to both male expectations and acceptable female behavior in the face of those expectations, which adds the delicious frisson of feminism’s attempts to create female roles that are not defined by feminine utility as viewed by males. The instant Anita steps out of the exploration of ethics, morality, and violence and into the exploration of personal relationships tainted with conventional gender roles, she becomes not an ambiguous female character but a merely female one. She loses a large chunk of the mysterious tension that makes her such a compelling protagonist.

Edward, as Anita’s fellow killer and pioneer at the frontier of ethical ambiguity, serves as the male half of the noir exploration in earlier Blake books. Even Anita isn’t sure whether or not he’s going to kill her once he decides he should, and one can only presume Edward returns the favor.

We have two halves of a perfectly balanced coin here; the Vampire Executioner series could have just as easily been about Edward. The fact that Anita is female makes her moral and ethical transgressions so much more compelling. When all is said and done, society is far more comfortable with aggressive, morally flexible male killers than with females who share the same qualities. Just look at all the Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy, Executioner, and male superhero-based comic books out there. Violence is traditionally the purview of the male.

Edward’s function is to underscore Anita’s difference. She is a girl who can play with the boys as an equal, on her own terms. The two have found a commonality of violence, and Edward’s attempts to make Anita an honorary “man” were met in earlier books by Anita’s stubborn refusal to step out of the gray ethical area engendered (ha ha) by her gender. We presume Edward never thinks too much about the monsters he kills; he is perilously close to being, like Buffy, merely an Extermination of Supernatural Insects Specialist. What makes Anita the protagonist, and a wonderfully compelling protagonist at that, is the balance between her capacity for cold-blooded murder in service to the law and the mulling over of the ethical and moral issues and quandaries raised by cold-blooded murder in service to the law.

Testosterone-driven stories of male lawgivers separated from lawbreakers only by a freak of ethical circumstance are everywhere. We have a positive hunger in our society for stories about cops or decorated military men going on rampages of violence that are acceptable for various “moral” reasons. (Rambo. The Punisher. Lorenzo Carcaterra’s Apaches and Sleepers, Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, the terrorfest of 24 . . . need I go on? And let’s not even talk about the Western genre....) By switching the gender of the protagonist, a fresh wellspring of transgressive tension is suddenly created and gleefully plundered.

In some senses, Anita’s only true relationship consistently untainted by traditional gender roles is with Edward. He could care less what dangly bits she has. He only cares if she’s able and willing to back him against the monsters. Descriptions of Edward and Anita’s interactions are fueled by a breathless tension far more incredibly sexual in its intensity than any seduction scene between Anita and Jean-Claude. Jean-Claude, merely by engaging in sex with Anita, becomes a victim of traditional roles and fits neatly into a predetermined slot. Edward, however, still retains the charge of the transgressive, the ambiguous, the violent, the mysterious holder of the power of life and death.

The more Anita moves toward a focus on personal relationships, the more Edward recedes like Raina. The fringe ceases to become visible the closer one moves to the mainstream. And all of Edward’s highly charged power as the mirror (male) image of Anita drains away once Anita does not mirror him. Once again, one end of the teeter-totter thumps down to earth, and one-half of the equation is left high and dry while the other half is marooned in dusty clay. Edward, the husband and dad with a “secret,” is a recognizable figure (like any CIA or FBI man in male-driven genre fiction) instead of a transgressive, liminal one.

Again, this is not to say that a focus on personal relationships is a bad thing. Both the genres that focus on the theme of personal relationships—a subsection of lit fic and the romance genre—have their own sources of dramatic tension and their own ways of examining gender roles and mores as well as the transgressing of the same.

The romance genre, in particular, has served as an ongoing conversation about femininity and gender roles. The gothics and Victoria Holt virgins of the seventies led to the boardroom virgins and sheikh kidnappings of the eighties, which gave way to the slightly more diversified (but still prone to a good forced-seduction) nineties, all leading to the chick-lit and paranormals of the naughts. We can only guess at what new forms the conversation will take in the future. The romance field is a behemoth and a shapeshifter, much like the fantasy field itself, where Anita first made her home.

What made Anita unique to me was her moral and ethical ambiguity as a female protagonist. In Anita’s footsteps have followed a slew of kickass urban-fantasy heroines, with varying degrees of ambiguity when it comes to murder and mayhem. Very few of them approach the level of tension in the first four Blake books; the superlative among them seem to rest in a comfortable hinterland at the level of, say, Burnt Offerings, the last book where I was genuinely uncertain whether Anita and Jean-Claude were going to kill each other—or fall into bed. The rest tend to clump in a group that either fall more neatly into the romance genre (the exploration of personal relationships) or deal with ethical ambiguity at about a quarter of the intensity of the first Blake novels.

Anita’s ambiguity rested for me on her uncompromising, fierce adherence to her own ethical code and her refusal to overly flagellate herself with guilt over the “murder” of monsters. At its best, this dynamic approached a feverish, nightmarish, Silence of the Lambs intensity. At its most chilling, it led the reader to examine just how uncomfortable the thought of a woman with a gun and a reason to use it makes anyone raised with our cultural gender expectations.

To me, the shift toward personal relationships in the Anita Blake series robs the characters, both primary and secondary, of a great deal of tension and immediacy. And yet, the early Blake novels kicked in the door of fantasy with a Browning Hi-Power in either hand, eyes narrowed and alight with hellish fire. The idea of a female protagonist who feels little guilt over the murder she does for society was a gigantic kick in the literary balls, so to speak, and a whole generation of urban fantasy writers owe a huge debt of gratitude to Anita Blake for that particular nut-shot.

Early Anita Blake was a direct descendant of those gumshoes in Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett shorts and novels. The scarred, fictional men who moved in perpetual twilight, physically as well as ethically, trying to be decent in a not-so-decent world, can be proud of their daughter Anita for breaking new ground. If she has moved out of that twilight, it is nobody’s business but hers—but still, I long sometimes for a return to the good old bad days of Anita, where the monsters were monsters, not Stepford lycanthropes, and the only way to meet them was with the understanding that you might be killing them tomorrow no matter how useful—or sexually charged—they are today.

But then, I always wanted the noir gumshoe to go off into the sunset with his smartmouth secretary instead of mooning over the heartless dame who would give him trouble, too. The problem with ambiguous characters is that they make the reader yearn for an end to the tension, and when that end comes, the reader longs for the old breathless excitement of not knowing which way the protagonist—and, therefore, the reader herself—is going to jump.

If you asked me what I write I would say Paranormal Thrillers. It encompasses everything I do, and doesn’t try and pigeonhole me. The essay that follows says that I write romances—paranormal romances, but romances—and then proceeds to explain why I’ve broken all the romance rules. I broke them because no one told me there were any rules, because I hadn’t read a “romance” since junior high and that was a Harlequin back in the day when they were all squeaky clean and the barest hint of sex was all you had. Love conquers all: I knew that was a lie by the time I was ten. The adults around me had proven that. In fact, when I was young I was never getting married. I never dreamed of my wedding, or fantasized about the perfect man, because I didn’t believe in a perfect anything. By the time I was teenager I’d seen too much harsh reality, real violence, death. It’s not the stuff to make you daydream about Prince Charming. By age fourteen or fifteen I knew that if anyone was going to save my ass, it was going to have to be me. A lot of my girlfriends read romances, but I just didn’t understand the idea of them. The premise escaped me. So imagine my surprise when I started writing what I thought was a horror/mystery series about Anita Blake who raised the dead and executed vampires for the government, and was told it was a romance series. Romance? Me? Surely not.

When Buffy the Vampire Slayer came on TV I’d been writing this stuff for years, but she had her Angel and I could see that it was romantic. I could see that Jean-Claude and Anita was romantic, and that Anita and Richard was romantic, but I still thought of the books as a mystery series—one with vampires and werewolves, but still a mystery series. But a lot of my female audience thought of them as romances. That was fine with me, until I wrote the unforgiveable. I had Anita choose the wrong man.

Oh, dear God, I took crap for her sleeping with the vampire and not the good little werewolf. Then later on I took even more crap because having slept with both she chose to leave both their asses and try to maintain her own identity. And then, I apparently committed the last and most unforgiveable romance crime, I brought in a new man out of the blue, Micah, and had her fall for him. I have never had such hatred directed toward me as I did when Narcissus in Chains came out. Richard, our good little werewolf, had dumped Anita, but the fans were so adamant that she had dumped him I actually went back and reread the scene, thinking I was misremembering. But no, he dumps her. But somehow it was her fault, my fault. It was as if I’d personally dumped their favorite brother.

I didn’t understand it then, and really don’t now, but this essay explains by not even mentioning the other men. The essay talks about romance and talks only about Richard and Jean-Claude, the up-right good guy and the seductive bad boy, werewolf and vampire respectively. The other men are only hinted at, and that sums up the reason I am not romance. I’ve broken too many rules. I’m not mystery because I’ve broken their genre rules by having the relationships be important. I am neither fish nor fowl, for any genre. Let me say that my female readership has continued to grow since I broke these rules, and my male readership has grown by leaps and bounds, too. Sometimes by not fitting in you find that you’re not the only one who felt restricted by the rules. I write Paranormal Thrillers, and for that definition, if you need one, I fit just fine.