Danse Macabre is a  horror/mystery/erotica novel by American writer Laurell K. Hamilton,  the fourteenth book in the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series.
 Danse Macabre is French for "Dance of Death". The phrase historically refers to a late-medieval allegory of the universality of death, in which Death personified summons people to the world beyond the grave despite their objections. Originally a dramatic performance, in the centuries since it has been represented in art, poetry, and music.
 The modern superstition is simply that "Death" appears at midnight every year on Halloween. He calls forth the dead from their graves to dance for him while he plays his fiddle. The skeletons dance until the rooster crows at dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year.
 Within the novel, "Danse Macabre" is the name of the vampire ballet company that performs during the course of the novel's events. It also refers to the general "vampire politics" that serve as the central conflict in the plot.  Although "Danse Macabre" is also the name of a vampire-themed nightclub owned by Jean-Claude, the nightclub appears only briefly at the end of this novel.
 Danse Macabre appears to take place a few weeks after the events of Incubus Dreams and almost immediately after the events of Micah, assuming that the series of serial killings that Anita's friend Ronnie refers to as occurring two weeks earlier are the killings Anita investigates in Incubus Dreams.
 Unlike the previous thirteen novels, neither Anita's role as a Federal Marshal nor her job as a zombie animator plays any part in this novel.  Instead, Anita must juggle a series of problems arising from her own increasing power, Jean-Claude's vampire politics, and her own personal life, complicated in this case by Anita's apparent pregnancy.
 Ultimately, Anita resolves most of these conflicts:
 Due to the small amount of time lapsed in this novel (the events last only a day), Anita is unable to resolve any of the plotlines left open in Incubus Dreams, and leaves several questions unresolved in this book as well.
 Danse Macabre features the following major characters.
 Recurring characters include:
 Non-recurring characters include:
 The critical reception of Danse Macabre has been mixed.
 Robert Folsom of the Kansas City Star wrote a critical review, stating:
 after 13 erotically charged books, boredom has reared its ugly head for the 14th novel in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series, "Danse Macabre" (Berkley; $25.95), as eroticism becomes mere description... So the stage is set for intrigue. Yet the words and actions Hamilton has her characters say and do seem more of a writing exercise than elements of true portrayal. In contrast, a Denver Post review took a more positive view of the eroticism in Hamilton's work.  Although the Post review noted that "[t]hose looking for mystery and mayhem on this Anita adventure are out of luck" and "it will be interesting to see how long Hamilton can sustain a large audience while avoiding the sort of solid plots that were characteristic of her earlier novels," the review was largely positive, writing that "the main attraction of the Anita Blake novels in the past five years has been their erotic novelty," and "[f]ew, if any, mainstream novels delve so deeply into pure, unadulterated erotica."