Review: Or, wah wah wah, sex sex sex
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 05 8, 2012
Before you buy "Beauty," please consider: this is not a novella by Laurell K. Hamilton. It is not even a short story, since that implies some kind of self-contained story.It is a single sex scene that the editor deemed too pointless to leave in her next novel.In other words, if "Micah" caused you to explode into a flaming fury over having to pay for a padded-out short story, "Beauty" will have roughly the same effect. It's a plotless, pointless little chunk of prose that is basically devoted to Anita whining about her tough, tough life, and then having sex with two of her boytoys. It's as if you distilled the entire series into two chapters.In the first chapter, Anita comes home from a zombie-raising job... or something. She wangsts about how she's half-Mexican, meaning she's not tall, bony and blonde like every other white person in the entire world. JC assures her that she's dazzlingly gorgeous, and their makeout session is interrupted by Asher, who wanders randomly into the bathroom to ALSO assure her that she's dazzlingly gorgeous. Then she assures Asher that he's also dazzlingly gorgeous. Boring.In the second chapter, Anita has sex with them. It's the same stuff we're used to.Yes, that is the entire story. I'm not kidding. The backstory of "Beauty" is that originally it was a part of Hamilton's forthcoming novel "Kiss The Dead," but her editor excised it because it was boring, pointless and repetitive. So Hamilton scooped up the scene that WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH FOR A PUBLISHER TO PAY FOR, and sold it on the Internet as an e-book.So there's no story, no plot and no connection to "Kiss the Dead." It's just sex and whining.Even worse, it's sex and whining that seem to have been recycled from half a dozen earlier LKH works. Anita makes the exact same complaints as always -- she's not tall and blonde, people think she's a monster/slut, she's not worthy of JC and Asher -- just so her boytoys can assure her that she's the sexiest woman who's ever lived. Then they have yaoi-fangirl sex. Finito.As if the recycled content wasn't bad enough, Hamilton's writing just makes Anita seem like a whiny brat. At one point she declares that the people who dare to criticize her are "just jealous whiner babies." Classy. Mature. And her sexy dialogue is so awkwardly bad you'd think it came out of "50 Shades of Grey" ("I knew I would have Anita waiting for me, why would I want to feed on anyone else?")."Beauty" is not beautiful. It's basically a big of discarded fluff that has no real relevance to anything, like a dust bunny being peddled as potting soil. For the same content, reread a few paragraphs from any late-period Hamilton novel.