Photograph by Mike De Filippo
Laurell K. Hamilton is closing in on Stephen King with her fey, erotic horror novels. "Why do you come up with these stories and I don't?" wondered a woman who grew up across the street. "Well," said Hamilton, "why don't you?"
Come August, you might pick up The New York Times bestseller list and scan the authors at the top. Dan Brown will probably be there with his latest church conspiracy, along with John Grisham, Nora Roberts, John Patterson and whatever memoirist Oprah braves next.
And St. Louisan Laurell K. Hamilton.
Laurell K. who?
You either know her or you don’t. Bookstores shelve her novels under fantasy/science fiction; some libraries put them in the mystery section, others in fiction. Her genre is fantasy, horror, romance, mystery, thriller—all at once. The books make the ladies in the suburban book club blush, but they are wildly entertaining. One series—Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter—is set in St. Louis, with zombies, werewolves and shape-shifters running the streets. The Landing is a vampire-bar district, Wildwood a stop for serial killers. Strip clubs in Sauget function as plot devices. St. Louis heat and humidity thicken the atmosphere.
So does the fact that, at various times, the main character has dated vampires, werewolves and wereleopards. Would Hamilton?
“If all safety concerns were off the board, I’d probably date all of them at least once,” she says. “For something long-term, my considerations would be practical: I’d choose one who wouldn’t wreck my life.” One top candidate is Micah, a wereleopard: “He told Anita, ‘I will do anything you want, just to be in your life.’ He’s a walking yes. More and more, I am attracted to people who do not make me fight constantly to have a relationship.”
Hamilton loves imagining werewolves and wereleopards into existence because it means researching the real animals (she was a biology major). But the supernatural versions fascinate for other reasons—our fear of powerlessness, for example. “These are the most dangerous predators,” she points out. “We want to take on their characteristics.” As for vampires, “They are dead—but they’re not. They have conquered what is most people’s biggest fear. And someone who is dead but still himself is very intriguing.”
The heart of the series, though, is Blake—diminutive but strong, smart, loyal to her friends, caustic and fearless. Hamilton created a character not unlike herself—and then put her in a world unlike anything anyone else has ever imagined.
Now 43, Hamilton started writing at 12—but didn’t sell her work until the early ’90s. Now her Blake series is published in 14 languages and has twice soared to second place on the weekly New York Times list: for Incubus Dreams in October 2002 and Cerulean Sins in April 2003. The writers who kept her out of the top spot? Stephen King and Nora Roberts.
“Miss Roberts was writing, at the time, a more traditional romance, in which the characters live happily ever after,” Hamilton says politely. “My books don’t work like that.”
She has collections of short stories, one of which will be published this fall; two publishers; a staff; a website that sells sterling-silver fang necklaces, stuffed animals and naked-werewolf mugs; a blog she updates two or three times a week; and legions of fans worldwide. She is, in short, a cottage industry. Micah, a paperback companion novel to the Anita Blake series, was released last month, and this July, the 14th in the series, Danse Macabre, will be published in hardcover.
“Absolutely one of our most important books this year,” says Susan Allison, Hamilton’s editor at Berkeley Publishing, a division of Penguin Putnam. Allison says Hamilton is popular because she has created characters so real, readers actually care about them. “Laurell has been quite fearless about letting her characters live their own lives.”
“I don’t know if I’m fearless,” Hamilton counters. “Sometimes it scares me quite a bit. But my characters—it’s like trying to give advice to your friends. Sometimes they take it, sometimes they don’t.” Which character surprised her most? “Well, I didn’t count on Jean-Claude becoming a romantic lead,” she confides. “He was a walking corpse. You don’t date those.”
Hamilton lives in a sprawling suburb of St. Louis, one she won’t name because she guards her family’s privacy fiercely. But the trees are tall and leafy, and birds and squirrels frolic in the back yard. She lives with her husband, Jonathon Green; daughter, Trinity; and four dogs—two pugs and two part-pugs. Her neighbors, who see her out walking her dogs, describe her as quiet and businesslike, maybe not someone who’d organize the block party but certainly someone who might show up and be friendly.
We’re sitting on two folding chairs in Hamilton’s office, a brand-new room in a brand-new addition to her house. Despite the grayness of the day, the room is bright with natural light, and the conversation is punctuated by bird sightings or dogs running through the yard. Hamilton is talking, a bit reluctantly, about moments—moments in a life, moments in a career.
She grew up in Indiana, raised by her grandmother, Laura Gentry, who told her ghost stories and tales of horror from her own hometown in the hills of Arkansas. “She’d say, ‘You’d better go to bed now, or Rawhead and Bloody Bones will get you,’” an old Celtic nursery scare tactic. “She was one of the most pessimistic women I ever met. She wanted to make sure I understood how hard life could be, and she helped make me, as she put it, ‘independent as an old widow woman.’”
Hamilton’s parents had divorced when she was a baby, and her mother was killed in a car accident when Laurell was 6. Books kept Laurell company—but the books that drew her were stories of horror and fantasy. She read vampire books and mysteries and knew that was what she wanted to write.
She is asked about the moment she knew she had succeeded—and it’s not a question she likes. “I don’t think there’s a moment. When I sold my first book, I still had laundry to fold,” she says. “When I hit the New York Times list, I was far from home on a tour; I was exhausted and wanted hot tea more than I wanted anything else. Because I try not to get caught up in things I cannot control, they don’t mean as much to me as other things would.”
Still, moments happen, whether we recognize them or not. In college—a small Christian college in Indiana—Hamilton was determined to take those stories she’d been writing since age 12 to the next level. But the head of the writing program objected to her choice of genre. “She did her best to thoroughly crush me,” says Hamilton, who was told that she was a corrupting influence on the other students because, after she started submitting fantasy and horror stories, they started experimenting with romances and Westerns. One day, when the professor began a tirade about all genre writing’s being “trash,” Hamilton raised her hand and stood to speak:
“I said, ‘What about C.S. Lewis? Is he trash?’ Well, of course, it’s a Christian college, so she said, ‘No, C.S. Lewis isn’t trash.’ I said, ‘What about Tolkien?’ and she said, ‘Well, no.’ I said, ‘What about Shakespeare—the ghost in Hamlet, the witches in Macbeth? What about Charles Dickens?’ She said, ‘What about Charles Dickens?’ and I said, ‘A Christmas Carol is a ghost story. And Moby Dick is just a monster movie …’ and that’s when she told me to sit down.
“It wasn’t long afterward that she asked me to leave the program.”
Hamilton stayed at the college, earned degrees in biology and English literature, married her college sweetheart and moved to Los Angeles for his job. After a stint in corporate America as an editor for a textbook company, she quickly realized that she didn’t fit into a corporate model. She says that when she got downsized, she didn’t mind at all, because she had already started writing again.
“I was getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning and writing two pages a day, every day,” she says, “because I didn’t have the discipline to write after an eight-hour day in corporate America.”
When she and her first husband moved to St. Louis, she found a writing group—one in which she remains active—and an agent. Her first book, Night Seer, was published in 1992. It didn’t sell as expected, and people began telling her that fantasy was dead. She ignored them.
Researching a plot for Anita Blake, she found herself talking nonchalantly with strippers in Sauget. The young women sat there nude, with the men in the club eyeing the intense conversation, but “what we were talking about was how hard it is to find a good preschool,” Hamilton recalls. “I end up in the most extraordinary circumstances, talking about the most mundane things.”
Hamilton had 60 or 70 pages of her first Anita Blake book when another opportunity struck, this one at a science-fiction convention held here in St. Louis. Because she already had a published book, she was asked to serve as a last-minute replacement for a writer from a Star Trek show.
“The room was packed,” she recalls. “They didn’t know who I was. People thought I was one of the writers for the show.” Hamilton—and Anita—won over the crowd. “Nobody left. People would come to the door, then come in and listen. Nobody hated it. That was when I knew I had material people would read.”
She published that book, Guilty Pleasures, in 1994; the 14th in the series hits the shelves this July, and she’s four books into another bestselling series, the Merry Gentry series, about a fairy princess living in Los Angeles.
Too much has been made, Hamilton says, of the connection between the Merry series and her grandmother, who was much too uncomfortable about sex to inspire such racy books. Yes, Gentry was her last name, but it’s also Irish slang for “fey.”
Hamilton is bemused by the connections people draw, the attention they pay to every nuance of her life.
“A friend was worried I’d get a big head,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Judy, we have cleaned vomit off each other’s children; I don’t think you have to worry.’ Nothing makes you humble like taking care of a baby or a puppy. If I didn’t have my daughter, if I didn’t have my dogs, I might have more trouble not thinking I was wonderful.
“Or maybe I wouldn’t,” she adds suddenly. “I’m a little puzzled by celebrity. I don’t get it.”
Hamilton gets recognized at malls and restaurants with increasing frequency: “The first few times it happened, it freaked me out. But most people just want to know when the next book is coming out. Of course, the Murphy’s Law of fame is that the day you have no makeup on and your hair is in a ponytail and you’re really looking forward to getting like, milk, is the day you’re going to be recognized. One gentlemen got on the Internet afterward and trashed me, saying how awful I looked and how I didn’t look like my pictures.”
That’s just a glimpse of the darker side of fame. Because Hamilton’s books are so vivid and her characters are so real, some fans have trouble differentiating the author from her main character. They somehow assume that Hamilton and Blake are the same and that Blake’s experiences mirror Hamilton’s personal life. When Hamilton was going through her divorce, for example, some fans took it personally.
“People felt that my personal life was fodder for their anger,” she says. “At one point, my main character was dumped by one of the men in the series, and some fans across the country were convinced she dumped him. You’d have thought their real-life favorite brother got dumped by Anita. They were incredibly nasty and horrible about it.
“I’d say 98 percent of the fans are wonderful people. There’s just 2 percent who are … I don’t know how to explain it, but my personal life, and my personal pain, came up for abuse.”
Hamilton says people wouldn’t believe some of the questions she is asked—in public—about her personal life and her husband’s. “I begin every talk I give with a caveat: ‘Please don’t ask me things you would not ask in front of your mother or your great-aunt or your best friend,’” she says.
“My only goal was to be able to make a living and support myself and my daughter through my writing,” she remarks a moment later. “You can’t count on success. You just can’t.
“The greatest part of the Anita series is that I’ll be able to write it for as long as I want,” she adds. “After my first series’ dying after just one book, this is wonderful. Being able to write what you want, the way you want to write it, for as long as you want to write it, and know you have an audience—that, to me, is success.”
So sometime this summer, a list will come out, and when it does, Hamilton is likely to be folding laundry or sipping a cup of tea or working on another writing project. She and her husband have been in talks with Hollywood producers about a movie deal for Guilty Pleasures, and Jon is working on a script. Hamilton will do a few local signings, maybe go on a book tour that will make her miss her home and her daughter. Those are the things that will matter.
“It’s wonderful to make good money, to have a beautiful house and to work,” she says. “But it wasn’t what I planned, because you can’t.”
Shot on location at the City Museum. Styling by Priscilla Case of Talent Plus.
