Most helpful customer reviews
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1.0 out of 5 stars
There are better things you could be reading, Nov 3 2004
Laurell K. Hamilton's "The Lunatic Café" is a substandard work of fiction with no redeeming literary or entertainment values. Hamilton's main failings lie in her very basic ability to write interesting characters, description, and dialogue. Her characters are broad and stereotypical: the hard, cold, and strong heroine; the sexy foppish vampire; the sensitive but strong lover with a dark side. She fills her dialogue with needless explanations of otherwise subtle observations and recognizable jokes. If, by the end of the book, it is not made clear to you in the most obvious ways possible that Anita Blake is a hard, take-no-guff woman, then there's something wrong. Ultimately, Hamilton simply fails to create erotic/horrific atmosphere. Her love scenes fall limp and her shocks and terrors that could be deeply disturbing and taboo-erotic pass with a terrible banality that plagues the whole book. Because of Hamilton's penchant for conclusions that never conclude the plots introduced in the story, you won't even have the satisfaction of saying you finished reading her book. Like bad fan-fiction that managed to get published, "Lunatic Café" should be seriously avoided.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
1 star is pretty generous, Nov 3 2004
This is a banal text, poorly written in every regard. Though Hamilton may have a sense for action beats in her works (which she should at this point in her incredibly-long career), everything else is marred by her lack of skill at dialogue, description and knowing when to sit back and let the story work, rather than filling it with endless, meaningless "witty" quips from her narrator. The characters are stock and unlikeable, but only because they are completely devoid of originality.If her other works are anything like this one, then she will have a statue erected in her name in the literary hall of shame before it is all said and done.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A werewolf or a vampire for a lover... Decisions, decisions!, Jun 26 2004
Once again, Laurell K. Hamilton hits a home run with this exceptional novel. The Lunatic Cafe is the fourth Anita Blake installment and my favorite thus far. Though this one has a bit of a slow start action-wise, it has a far more compelling plot that centers on Anita's personal life. Anita is dating Richard, something that doesn't sit well with Jean-Claude, the vampire Master of the City. Jean-Claude wants Anita as well and he, too, wants to date her. She's always said she wouldn't date one of the monsters, yet she is involved with a werewolf. But Richard has great human qualities. He is a schoolteacher, a genuinely nice guy, a boy next door of sorts -- minus the small fact that he's the leader of a pack of shape shifters with a secret and animalistic penchant for a mixture of blood, sex and violence. Jean-Claude is the proverbial bad boy -- a fearful leader and a shameless seducer who doesn't bother to hide his monstrous side, but irresistible all the same. In order to keep Jean-Claude from killing Richard, Anita acquiesces to his proposal of dating both men at the same time. But the reader knows that Anita is attracted to Jean-Claude, no matter how much she denies it. If this interesting little love triangle isn't bad enough, she has to find out why eight shape shifters and lycanthropes are missing. There are various twists throughout the novel...This is the most exciting part of the series I've read thus far. Laurell K. Hamilton keeps you in suspense from beginning to end. Richard is a great character, but he's nowhere near as compelling and sensual as Jean-Claude. I am still hoping that he and Anita will get together. The building of tension is so slow it's torturous! But the aforementioned tension is delectable beyond compare. The characters are always excellent. The most interesting character in this series is Edward. He's a caricature of a character with an unreadable personality. Perhaps this is intentional, but I'm not sure. I hope to get to know this character in a deeper level in the future. Anyway, as said earlier, this is the best Anita Blake offering. I cannot recommend The Lunatic Cafe enough. A great summer read to enjoy resting on a hammock overlooking the sunset.
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