Use me, abuse me

I've been sitting on this post for almost a year now, but the time is ripe for a rant. About what, you might ask? Why, about authors who suck you in with a good book, which leads to a good series, which inexorably devolves into one bloated blood-drenched sex-fest after another instead of the fine plots and decent writing of the first books in the series (I'm looking at you, Laurell K. Hamilton).

And then there's those authors whose epic fantasy series become so epic that the 4 books they planned originally somehow become 12, plus assorted prequels and such. And they come out so infrequently that when the new one is released you have to go back and reread the whole bloody series because so much time has passed you've forgotten everything that happened before. This has led to my Robert Jordan Rule: I will only read an epic fantasy series if it is completely finished and I can read all the books in a row, or if the author is dead. One way or another I'll read the Wheel of Time series, but not unless either of those two things happen.

Speaking of Laurell K. Hamilton (not the only one, but definitely the worst of the lot): I used to love her Anita Blake books. But somewhere along the line (maybe when Anita started getting freaky with were-animals as well as vampires) the books changed from being fun dark fantasy romps to wall-to-wall sex with only enough plot to blow your nose into. Really! I'd say the last few books were 400 pages sex, 50 pages story. And that's not even getting into her new series about a fairy who has to get pregnant to gain the fairy kingdom. At least in that series there's no illusion that there's anything other than sex moving the plot along.

And yet...

And yet I still read the series in the hopes that one day the author will remember the type of book she used to write, the ones that sucked me in and made me love them. I have in my possession her latest Anita Blake book, The Harlequin, and I shall read it in the fervent hope that some of the old magic will reappear. My expectations for that have pretty much been trampled and then spat upon, but there are a few gasps of hope left.

There's a great article about this phenomenon over at Bookseller Chick, and Smart Bitches Trashy Books talked about their favourite use me, abuse me authors as well