Anita Blake is an Animator working for Animators, Inc. She also works as a Marshall who used to hunt vampires. But since Vampires came out and went legal, she can now only kill them if they step out of line.
But that's not what pays her bills. Working as an animator does. When her boss calls het to a consultation with a client who wants Anita to raise a corpse, Anita willingly goes along. But the job as presented, she turns down flat. Anita is very powerful and can raise really old corpses to life for s short time. But this client wants her to raise someone 243 years dead- and Anita won't do that- because someone dead that long would require more than just a goat or chicken to raise. To bring back someone dead that long would require a human sacrifice. And Anita won't go there. At all.
The man offers her a million dollars, then a million and a half, but Anita won't budge. She won't kill anyone to bring back the dead. Not for any amount of money, and her boss Bert, even though he's a huge prick, agrees with her on this point. Animals are fine. Humans? No way!
Soon after, Anita is called to a crime scene by the police. A man and a woman, killed in their home and partially consumed. They have a child- a boy, who is missing, and the Police and Anita want him found. But what could have killed the couple and eaten them? Anita knows the answer- Zombies, and she calls on her old Mentor, Manny Rodriguez to provide her entree to the one woman who could have done it and raised the Zombie or zombies who killed the parents.
Dominga Salvador is a voodoo High Priestess, and she's been looking forward to Anita, who is so very powerful. Dominga could teach Anita a lot about raising Zombies, but does Anita want to learn what this ultra-powerful, ultra-scary woman has to teach? When Dominga shows Anita the secret project she's been working on in her basement, Anita is terrified and repulsed, for Dominga has found a way to keep zombies from decaying- capture their souls at the moment of their death and put them back into the body when they are raised.
She tells Anita that there are plenty of people who would pay good money for zombies such as these, but Anita wants no part of that at all, which disappoints Dominga. She tells Anita that it was not her zombies that killed the couple, but also tells Anita some home truths about Manny that leave Anita rather disquieted- that Manny sacrificed the "White Goat" (Slang for humans) in voodoo rituals for her when he was younger.
Anita doesn't reject Manny for what he did- that was over 20 years ago. But she doesn't want to hang around with him for long after that- not right now, anyway. He understands and leaves, but when she gets home, she discovers one of the bodyguards from the man who wanted her to raise the old body near her house, and she has to drive him off with a gun when he offers her yet more money and gets irate over her continued refusal.
She meets with Dolph Storr after a funeral for a fellow hunter, and tries to track down the Zombie who did the killings. They find the boy's body, which makes both of them even more determined to get whoever raised that Zombie. Meanwhile, Anita looks to get some information from a werewolf reporter she knows, but her tete-a-tete is interrupted by Jean-Claude, who wants to gather her in with his people, since she bears his marks.
Anita is angry. She didn't ask for his marks, and she's not happy about carrying two of them. He's conciliatory, but tells her there is more. If he ever gives her the full four marks, she will be as immortal as he is, and there are other wrinkles as well. Anita doesn't want to hear it, but she agrees to meet Jean-Claude for a further discussion.
Anita meets Dolph back in the graveyard at night to finish tracking down their zombie. They find the grave it was raised from, but the body is missing and the gravestone shattered- which prevents them from making it easy to destroy the zombie. Anita takes the graveyard dirt and bits of the headstone to a psychic she knows, but he's not in the business any longer, and doesn't want to do it because of the psychic residue. Anita has to browbeat him into helping her, and he does, but afterwards throws her out.
Back at home, Anita is woken by a big ugly intruder smelling of death and decay. But when she runs out of bullets in the middle of the fight against it, how will she survive?
I really like the early Anita Blake books, and this one was great. It's nice to see Anita afraid and not have her dealing with her problems by screwing them into submission, as she seems to do in the later books. And here, Anita is merely human, and can still feel a healthy sense of fear and disgust. Especially with Dominga, whose actions and attitude seem to be "If I can do it, I am right to do so." Her idea of imprisoning human souls in a dead body forever is just amazingly disgusting and scary, and we agree with Anita that it's wrong.
Of course, we know that the guy who tried to hire Anita to raise the very old body isn't going to take no for an answer, and at some point, he'll have to try and force her to do it. Or he could try and hire Dominga- and I'm not sure which prospect scares me more. The graphic novel ends on a cliffhanger- will Anita get out of her peril. Well this isn't the last book in the series, so there's more of a question of how she'll get out of it alive and with all her body parts intact. And honestly, it's been so long since I read it, I don't remember any more, so it was a cliffhanger for me, too.
As a graphic novel, the series is good and effective, and I loved seeing Anita in her penguin nighties and reacting to stuff like an ordinary human again, unaffected by the power creep (or is it more like Power surge?) that she gets later. For making me feel with and for Anita, this comic gets high marks, and so I recommend it. For anyone who wants to know why the Anita Blake series is so popular and was so powerful, this graphic novel brings home a long-fogotten lesson. Read it and see.
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