Incubus Dreams(Unabr.)(Libr.)(CD) [Audiobook, CD, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

After a very strong start this series has taken a drastic turn from it's well written and exciting mystery/modern fantasy action beginnings into a embarrassingly disconnected plot nightmare sandwiched in between more and more descriptive and frankly unbelievable sex scenes.

The main character, Anita Blake, has evolved from a near virgin, vampire hating, stickler for the letter of the law to a cold blooded murdering "I'll sleep with anything within a 5 mile radius whore".

Talk about character development.

Initially the series was very intent about making connections between Anita's developing powers and solving the big murder to stop the bad guys. Now it's degraded into endless pages of sex with strangers and/or multiple partners all of the werewolf and/or vampire variety and oh by the way, that murder you started the book with you forgot to get back to for 150 pages in between your latest sexual encounter.

Don't get me wrong, the occasional departure into "romance" can be a worthwhile part of a story line but any book where I can read about getting your cervix bumped mentioned about half a dozen times really shouldn't be listed in any other genre but erotica...

TLDR? Disappointing spiral into the toilet bowl from promising beginnings.

If you are into Anita Blake having really bad sex every couple of hours with a dizzying assortment of vampires, werewolves, and other creatures you might enjoy it. Its nothing but sex - I couldn't even call it erotica - and between the dumb sex scenes there is no story, just long winded paragraphs that go nowhere. The book is way too long. I started scanning after the first 200 pages and never finished it at that.

Many pages. Many sex scenes. Teeny weeny plot.

Laurell K. Hamilton stumbles further into the depths of literary Hades with "Incubus Dreams," a dreary erotic horror-fantasy thriller... or is it, thrilling horror-fantasy erotica? Probably the latter -- the most colorful thing about it is Hamilton's insistently graphic sex scenes. Squeezed between the bouts of sex is a tepid little plot, which seems to be suffocating under pressure.

Anita Blake's life hasn't been the same since she acquired the "ardeur," which basically requires her to have sex constantly. Now she's coming to terms with the fact that she has a male harem, and quite an assortment of new powers. However, her old job still exists -- strippers are being mysteriously drained of blood.

To make things worse, the St. Louis police department is getting suspicious of Anita's increasingly supernatural connections -- she's getting too chummy with the werecreatures and vampires. So (between random sex scenes), Anita calls on help to find whoever has murdered the strippers.

There's a lot of sex in this book. A LOT of sex. So much that the actual plotline can be covered in a mere twenty minutes, if you skip the sex. In fact, Hamilton's strippers-being-sucked-dry plot seems almost like it was hastily tacked between assorted sex scenes. What's worse, the tantalizing plot hints at the end of "Cerulean Sins" are left dangling.

A few flickers of Hamilton's wit do show through, given Jean-Claude's acid comment about Anita having "accidental" sex. The pace is slower, and Hamilton seems to be cluing in a little on some of the things that made her past two books so unsatisfying.

Unfortunately, she hasn't caught on that her graphic, weirdly un-erotic sex scenes add nothing to the book. The consummation of the triumvirate (yes, consummation) is enough to make you cringe, and that's the only sex scene that really stands out.

Anita is obviously having an identity crisis -- it's like Hamilton is trying to meld different personalities together. The result? A very weird lead character who spends most of her time being crabby and whiny. Fans of werewolf Richard may be pleased, since Hamilton seems to have lost her disgust for him, but Jean Claude spends too much time clucking. And Micah? A laughable excuse for a love interest. Who needs a personality when you can have gonads?

Hamilton's latest is an improvement over the ghastly "Cerulean Sins," but it feels as if she wants to have her cake and eat it too -- change the Blake series to erotica, yet retain her old "feel." And certainly this time around, it isn't working.