Book #69

Narcissus in Chains
by Laurell K. Hamilton

It is too perfect that this book, which I am writing about after I finished the next book about how our minds find patterns and order in chaos and random chance, about how we ascribe meaning to meaningless coincidences often perceived only in hindsight, should be #69 on my list. Or is it too Beavis and Butthead of me to notice that?

So here it finally is, ten books (My god, I can't believe I've already read ten of these! When did I start reading them, June? July? Ridiculous.) into the series and the dreaded moment has come: Anita has gained the ardeur. Anita decided in the last book to make up for the psychic wounds she gave herself, Jean-Claude, and Richard when she broke off their connection and stopped seeing both of them, and so in this book, the triumvirate go through the step of "marrying the marks," allowing their auras to intermingle and fill the holes made by their connection and separation. But in the process, Anita gains Jean-Claude's ability to gain power through lust and sex, and with it she gains his need to do so every single day. Oh yeah, and Anita also gets into the middle of a were squabble, and one of her wereleopard accidentally wounds her, maybe turning her into a wereleopard for real, so we have that thread running through the book as well. Oh, and she finds a new lover, a werelopard king named Micah who is instantly and intimately connected to her by their shared place at the head of their respective wereleopard pards. And then there's the conflict between the werewolves and the wereleopards, when Richard blames Gregory for infecting Anita and maybe killing her -- and, much worse though he won't admit it, ending his secret guilty fantasy that maybe someday he could make Anita a werewolf and have her be his perfect mate -- and has the pack sentence Gregory to torture and death, a sentence that sticks even after Richard finds out that Anita is not dead because Richard has allowed the pack to become a pseudo-democracy, and he has new enemies that are trying to take over the pack from him and are using this to undermine his authority. Until Anita comes to get her leopard back. Oh right, and Anita and Richard finally end it completely, when they have sex, she feeds off of his lust, and he pitches a hissy-fit about her being more monstrous than he could ever be, and even worse, she is comfortable with the monsters in a way he will never be, and so he dumps her. Finally. And of course, there's the invasion of the werehyenas, an unknown but suddenly powerful faction in the shifter world, who get attacked by a remarkably nasty bad guy, the panwere Chimera, who tries to use the werehyenas as a stepping stone to taking over all of the shifters in the city, and maybe eventually the world.

And people read this book and get upset because there's sex. And they say that the plot becomes weak at this point in the series, and it all devolves into little more than porn. Are they reading the same book I did?

I thought the sex scenes were as well done as every other graphic, visceral moment in this very graphic series. I thought the moment at the end of the shower scene, when Anita ends up crying on the floor of the shower because she thinks she has finally turned completely into a monster was incredibly poignant, and I loved the way Hamilton managed to bring Anita around to some kind of acceptance over the course of the single book. I love how this author has managed to bring Anita a step closer to monsterhood, without ever taking away her basic humanity and her core beliefs and strengths, and her intrinsic conflicts and vulnerabilities, in every single book of this series. Anita has been forced by her own values and her basic nature into becoming a radically different person, one she herself would have hated -- and yet, because she has never betrayed her basic values, has in fact given up almost everything else she held dear in order to keep to her most basic values, she can accept the new person that she has become and even like herself. I think it is amazing, and incredible fun to read. My only complaint about this book is that it was too full, as the list above implies; there were just too many things going on, and so some of the plots, particularly the title one of Narcissus and the werehyenas, got short shrift, and that was too bad. But since the book is already 650 pages long, and took me longer to read than any of the previous books have required, I can understand why the final fight with Chimera ended up shorter than I would have liked. It focused on Anita, which was really what I wanted to read about, anyway.