Revisiting Anita Blake – Urban Fantasy’s Early Pulse and Why the Magic Faded

I started reading Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series sometime in the late 90s. My memory is fuzzy on the exact year, but I clearly remember hitting Obsidian Butterfly (2000) when it was only available in hardcover—always a sign that I’d caught up with a series that was still very much alive and kicking.

At the time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was arguably the coolest thing on TV, and I suspect it nudged me toward picking up Anita Blake. Long before “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance” became marketing categories, Hamilton was quietly shaping both genres. In hindsight, Anita Blake was probably the seed that later pushed me to try Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files—a series that ended up being much more my style.

From Gritty Detective Horror to Paranormal Romance

What initially drew me into the Anita Blake books was the blend of detective fiction, horror, and a touch of supernatural noir. Anita worked crime scenes. She raised the dead. She hunted monsters. It felt like a gritty cousin of Buffy’s monster-of-the-week formula, but darker and more adult.

Somewhere along the line, the tone shifted. Or perhaps it was always there, simmering under the surface and I just didn’t notice until it spilled over. But by the time Narcissus in Chains rolled around, the series had fully transformed into something else—something much more romance-first and, to my tastes, far less compelling. The shift felt sudden from my perspective, even if the breadcrumbs had been there all along.

Hamilton clearly discovered her core audience and leaned into it. No shame in that, but it was no longer the series I had signed up for, and I drifted away shortly after.

Returning to Where It Started

I reread Guilty Pleasures about a decade ago, but the experience didn’t stick. More recently, for reasons I can’t quite explain, I picked up books two and three again. Maybe I wanted to see whether the early spark I remembered was still there.

The short answer: not really.

The dialogue was far more stilted than I remembered, the characters thinner, and the pace frantic enough that I occasionally felt the pages were trying to outrun me. That said, the action and horror elements still hold up remarkably well, and the violence is much more graphic than I recalled—which makes the later pivot to paranormal romance feel all the more jarring.

Book three, Circus of the Damned, also introduces Richard Zeeman, kicking off the love triangle that would eventually swallow the series whole. Perhaps I was reading these books for the wrong reasons, but that trope always grated on me.

A Curious Absence From the Screen

Given how foundational Anita Blake was to shaping early 2000s urban fantasy, it’s genuinely surprising the series never made it to TV. Had it come out ten years later, during the boom of streaming-first supernatural shows, I think it would’ve been a prime candidate for adaptation.

And honestly, I suspect a TV version would have diverged heavily from the later romance-heavy arcs and stayed closer to the early crime/horror tone—much like how The Expanse, The Witcher, and Game of Thrones were reshaped for broader audiences.

Will I Keep Rereading?

I’m not feeling the old magic, but I may still push on with another couple of books to see where the reread takes me. Even flawed rereads have a certain nostalgic gravity. And there’s something oddly comforting in revisiting the stories that shaped our reading habits, even if they land differently decades later.

Maybe that’s worth a future post in itself—why we reread, and what we expect to find when we go back.