Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Books by Laurell K. Hamilton In Order

Plus the author reveals the origins of the Vampire Hunter series, outlines the arc of Anita Blake’s love life, and explains why her combination of romance, mystery, and horror is here to stay.

Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter is a series of urban fantasy novels, short stories, and comic books by Laurell K. Hamilton. The books, which have sold more than six million copies, star Anita Blake—a St. Louis-based vampire hunter, zombie raiser, and supernatural consultant for the police. The long-running book series celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2018—which places Anita Blake’s debut after the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, but before the 1997 series.

In the world of the Anita Blake series, supernatural creatures and powers are known to the public. As the author explained the world of Anita Blake to IGN:

“Anita Blake’s world is as if we woke up tomorrow and everything that went bump in the night, every movie monster, is real. Not only are they real, they're legal citizens with rights. If you have a zombie shambling down the middle of the street, not only will the cops believe you, they'll send somebody with a flamethrower! Vampires are in the courts fighting to get their rights back. They want their money back—they want heirs to give back the property.”

The Anita Blake series follows her ongoing conflicts with the supernatural as she solves mysteries, comes to terms with her abilities, and navigates increasingly complex relationships. Below is a complete list to date of Anita Blake, Vampire books. Click here to skip to the Laurell K. Hamilton Interview Excerpts.

Complete List of Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novels

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Urban Fantasy Author Laurell K. Hamilton on Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Where She Came From, and Where She's Going

In these interview excerpts, the author explains where she got the idea for the Anita Blake series, talks about how Anita’s love life has evolved over the course of the series, and reveals why genre purists need to get over it.

“I decided I would try to even things up. I may have overcompensated just a little.”

The author explained to Entertainment Weekly how and when the idea for the Anita Blake series came to her:

“[When] I found hardboiled detective fiction for the first time. The male detectives in their books could cuss and kill people if they were defending themselves and have sex and nobody thought anything of it. Though they were strong characters, the female detectives in their series very rarely cussed. If they killed anybody, they had to feel very guilty about it, and there was no sex or it was sanitized and offstage. It was such a stark contrast. I thought, this is unfair. I decided I would try to even things up. I may have overcompensated just a little. (laughs) I thought I would get bored if it was just straight mystery. I hoped the series would have legs, and so I wanted to give myself enough toys. I loved horror and monster movies since I was a little girl, so I thought What if I put [it] in a world where all the monsters are real and you just wake up tomorrow and you have to deal with it? Apparently I did give myself enough toys to play with.”

“There’s no end planned.”

Hamilton told I Smell Sheep that she plans to be writing Anita Blake books for a while:

“I’d always seen the Anita Blake series as a mystery series which means there’s no end planned. I’ll keep writing the books as long as the readers and I are enjoying ourselves.”

“Going back to the earlier books, I noticed she was not happy.”

Hamilton explained to Goodreads how Anita Blake’s love life has evolved over the course of the series:

“[In the beginning,] Anita was a conservative. In Europe, they complained that there was no sex. In fact, one Italian reporter said that Anita was not a modern woman because she didn't have sex, and of course in America over here people lost their minds when she did finally have sex. She was still trying to hold out for marriage, or at least a serious relationship.
“Mostly she was her job, she was a workaholic, like a lot of career people. And especially if you’re a police officer, and especially if you’re a detective. The hours are horrible, and you get involved in a case. As a writer, if I have a bad day and someone does something on paper, I have a chance to wake up tomorrow morning and rewrite it. If you do some version of Anita’s job—police officer or military for real—people really die, and there’s no redo. It’s an all-consuming kind of job. At the beginning she is consumed. She is her job. She raises the dead and tries to help protect and save people as much as she can, and that's what she does.
“It’s been very interesting—for Dead Ice, I reread parts of earlier books, because I had characters who had not been onstage in a long time. And going back to the earlier books afresh, I noticed she was not happy at the beginning of the books. She was very lonely, and she didn’t know how to have a personal life and have her job, which is a struggle for all of us.”

“I write what I want to read.”

The author outlined for Joel Eisenberg what she considered her formula for critical and commercial success:

“I write what I want to read, because no one else was writing exactly what I wanted to be reading. It’s that contrariness again. If no one will write vampires exactly the way I want to read them, then I’ll do it myself. The same was true for fairies. No one was doing it exactly the way I wanted to see it done. So I did it myself. I am blessed that what I want to read is what a great many other people want to read.
“I knew I needed a different series to sort of give me a breather from Anita Blake and the gang. Just a book, in between Anita books, to let me play in a different playground for a while. I floated two ideas to publishers, and the only thing they had in common was that they were all mixed-genre. They were all modern day, and they all had a large dose of the fantastic—the type of fiction that I’ve become known for.
“First, it’s what I love, but second, I deliberately came up with ideas that wouldn’t, hopefully, alienate my readership. I wanted them to pick up the Merry books and feel like it was still my book, my world.
“Readers come to a writer that they love with expectations. I know I do, as a reader. As a reader I like knowing that if I pick up X’s book that I know what I’m getting, to a certain extent. I read a lot of series books, because it’s my favorite type of book to read. I love to start a series and know that I have books and books to enjoy the world, the characters, the writer’s voice.
“I think my enjoyment of series as a reader shows in how I write my own series. You got to love something to do it this long and still be fresh and having fun. I actually studied long-running series to see how it worked. Mostly mystery series, because there are more of them that have gone over ten books than any other genre I’m aware of. Same character, same world, etc. … I found that many series seemed to lose steam around book five or eight. They could still be good, but the writer seemed, if not bored, tired.
“One of the reasons I gave my hard-boiled private detective a world with vampires, werewolves, and zombies, was because I wanted to play with all my favorite toys in one series. I thought if I did that, I wouldn’t get bored. I was right, because as I finish up book twelve (of the Anita Blake series), “Incubus Dreams,” I am still learning new things about my world, my characters, and myself as a writer. Cool, huh?
“I actually found that somewhere between book four and book eight is where I really settle into a series as a writer. It’s where I fall in love with the world and the people and really begin to enjoy myself, because by around book four the voice is solid, and it’s less brute strength and more muse strength.”

“I started off like everyone else does, slogging but having a compulsion to put words on paper.”

Ms. Hamilton told Locus Magazine that she has pretty much always been a storyteller:

“As far back as I can remember, I have been making up stories. I didn’t write stories until I was 12-and-a-half—and I know it was 12-and-a-half, because all my characters were exactly my age for years and years. I started off like everyone else does, slogging but having a compulsion to put words on paper. I didn’t write or read horror or fantasy, other than children’s fantasy, until I was in my teens. Then I read Robert E. Howard’s ‘Pigeons From Hell’ in a collection, and the moment I read it I knew, not only did I want to be a writer, but this was what I wanted to write.”

“There is no going back.”

In this Barnes & Noble interview, the author talks about the life expectancy of cross-genre hybrids—particularly for the Anita Blake series combination of romance, fantasy, and horror:

“The landscape of genre and fiction in general has changed forever, there is no going back. Maybe if the paranormal field were static and just contained one type of storyline it would fade, but the field has continued to grow. You say that I combined romance, fantasy, and horror, but Anita Blake is a hard-boiled mystery series, too. Merry Gentry is a political thriller. So many people call the paranormal genre, paranormal romance, but it’s so much more than just romance alone. Even among the “romance” you have everything from serious and sexual, to light and humorous, to tongue firmly in cheek. We have a whole new crop of male writers who are bringing serious two-fisted tales of adventure to the paranormal genre. I am pleased to say that I’ve had the men tell me the same thing the women do, that my writing inspired them to write their own novels. I write as a good a fight scene as I do a sex scene, as good a mystery as a relationship arc, and other writers have come behind me to pick elements and expand them into their own worlds. Some paranormal series are doing better than others, and some types have glutted the market with less than stellar additions and those will fall to the Darwinism of the marketplace, but good stories and great characters—with or without paranormal elements—will find an audience and thrive. Also, bear in mind that the first Anita Blake novel, Guilty Pleasures, was rejected over 200 times, because no one knew what to do with something that mixed so many genres. One editor rejected the book, because the market couldn’t bear one more vampire novel, and another one came out that week, so they rejected me. We’re over 20 years down the road with my audience still growing with each book, and more titles in the paranormal genre than ever, so I think the predictions of an untimely death for it may be premature.”

“Some ideas just won’t fit in a short story and some characters demand a novel.”

In this Q&A with Nerd Daily, Laurell talks about the differences between writing short stories and novel-length fiction:

“Short stories can come in one muse-driven rush from inspiration to complete story. Novels can start out that way, but the muse doesn’t show up that strongly every day for hundreds of days in a row. I’ve got to show up for work on the days when the muse isn’t whispering sweet nothings in my ear, or a novel doesn’t get written. Short stories need one idea, or character to the primary focus, but a novel needs far more. In fact that’s one way I know if something’s a short story, a novelette, novela, or a novel by how many ideas collect around a character, or how many extra characters come to talk in the first draft. Some ideas just won’t fit in a short story and some characters demand a novel.”

“Probably the old Hammer vampire films were as great an early influence as any book.”

When Crescent Blues asked Laurell whether she re-read Dracula as she was creating her supernatural world, this is how she replied:

“I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people’s writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people’s fiction. Just don’t. They may be wrong. Most people who set down to write have been reading something in the area of what they end up writing for years. We’ve done all the fictional background we’ll ever need before we come close to the computer. I'd read nonfiction about folklore, mythology, and monsters for years. Just a hobby.
“Probably the old Hammer vampire films were as great an early influence as any book. I watched them at quite a tender age, and they are very sensual, very lush, pretty evil. But by the time I sat down to write Anita, I hadn't seen a Hammer film in years. I had almost stopped reading other people’s horror. I’d actually just begun to read mysteries. Anita would be very different if I’d never picked up a hard boiled detective mystery. I actually knew more about vampires and werewolves than I was able to put in the first book. But I knew almost nothing about voodoo. That was the biggest paranormal research I had to do. Guns and police procedure were the other area I had to research. I didn’t know nearly enough about either.”

“I gave myself all the monsters of the movies and most of the ones from folklore and myth, to help me stay interested.”

Fantasy Book Review asked Laurell why she keeps coming back to writing Anita Blake’s adventures:

“She’s become one of my best imaginary friends, as have many of the other characters in her world. I miss them when I’m not writing them, and I’m still learning new things about all of them, which is pretty exciting as I write the twenty-first book in the series. Anita’s character was developed in part because I read hard-boiled detective fiction after college, and found that the male detectives got to curse, have sex, and kill people without feeling badly about it, but the female detectives rarely cursed, had no sex, or it was sanitized and off stage, and if they killed someone, they had to feel really bad about it. I thought this was all unfair, so wanted a female character that could hold her own with the big boys. I may have overcompensated, but I thought that a straight mystery series would bore me after a few books, so I gave myself all the monsters of the movies and most of the ones from folklore and myth, to help me stay interested. It worked, I’m still having a great time.”

Here’s a video from when Laurell K. Hamilton presented Serpentine to University Bookstore: