Read about another book on the list.Narcissus in Chains by Laurell K. Hamilton
Narcissus in Chains is widely cited as being the moment the Anita Blake series took a turn for the seriously messed up and weird. Anita has returned to her friends and lovers (mostly lovers) after some time away. One of her boy-toys has gone completely off the deep-end and is killing people. A were-leopard has proposed to her. Her were-wolf boyfriend gets angry at her. And her vampire boyfriend has infected her with a new form of vampirism which lets her feed off people's lust, but she has to have sex ALL THE TIME or she will DIE. (Did we mention she's a necromancer/vampire/were-everything?) At one point, she has group sex with three guys, and then spends ages debating whether it was actually sex. Also, when she's first seized with the vampire lust power ("ardeur"), she takes advantage of a guy who's incapable of saying no, and she muses, "If someone can't tell you no, it's rape, or something close to it." Later, she's basically raped in the shower by a man who then becomes her boyfriend — although in the paperback version, Hamilton rewrote the scene to make it more ambiguously consensual. Hamilton wrote a blistering response to the "negative fans" who criticized the weird turn her books had taken, saying, "The arduer is a pain in my, and Anita's butt, too. But I believe in my world."
--Marshal Zeringue
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