lkh_lashouts | The forward to the new "The Killing Dance" HC

This is what this sorry excuse for a human being had published for all the world to read.

by Laurell K. Hamilton
WHEN I FIRST had the idea of writing afterwords for the hardback editions of my paperback originals, I was motivated by a feeling that you should get something more for your buck than just a hardback of a book you probably already own. The essays were supposed to be a little value added. They also were to give readers a glimpse into some of what I was thinking when I first wrote the book in their hands. Then a funny thing happened: We hit the books I was writing when my first marriage began to fall apart. I wasn’t even aware at the time I was writing book five, Bloody Bones, and this sixth book, The Killing Dance, that my marriage was in trouble. It was actually writing the afterword for Bloody Bones that helped me realize how intimately my creative life was tied to my real life. (Not in the way that some of the fans want it to be. My favorite Internet rumor was that I lived in a house that looked like the Addams Family’s mansion and had a dungeon where I kept a harem (or would that be hisem?) of beautiful men as my sex slaves. The fact that this particular rumor was actually believed for even a few seconds shows you just how weird some of my fans want me to be. Sorry, but my life isn’t that close to what I write.) But revisiting the books I’d written during this time of my life raised issues. Issues I thought I’d worked through. Mostly issues to do with anger. What am I angry about? Hmm, let me see...

I was raised to believe that you waited for marriage to have sex. That you went a virgin to the man you loved, and you promised to love and honor and be with him until death do you part. (I made them take out the “obey” part. I told the priest we’d marry at the courthouse first. He, and my first almost- then-husband, believed me. They dropped that offensive little word.) I earned my white dress, maybe by the skin of my teeth, because once I was in love and thought this was it, well, I was getting married. He was my first everything. The first man to touch me where a swimsuit touches me. The first orgasm of any kind. The first everything. I fell into love and into the wide, new world of sex with the confidence of youth and being in love for the first time. I found that I liked sex. I liked it a lot. Monogamy is a wonderful concept, if it works. If it doesn’t work, then it’s a lower circle of hell. Because you’ve sworn to love and be faithful to this one man, and only him. The trouble with being two virgins—and my first husband and I both prided ourselves on being virgins—is that you don’t know what you like. What if you find that what you like and what your husband likes aren’t the same? No one mentions that in the whole “save it for marriage” speech. No one hints that the level of sexual appetite between two people can be so amazingly different.

I still don’t regret having waited for marriage. Why? Because I like sex a whole lot. For me, it was like letting the genie out of the bottle. I craved it, wanted it all the time. If this had happened in high school, God knows where I’d be now. Maybe with an unwanted baby and no diploma. Doomed to work at some job I hated, trapped with my grandmother the way my own mother was because my father abandoned us. Or, how about AIDS? (You know, you can get AIDS from oral sex, too. It’s harder to catch, but do you really want to risk it?) I could be dead now—no books, no daughter, no nothing. Besides, there is no one I regret not sleeping with in high school. Truthfully, I never came close. I’ll tell you how squeaky clean I was: A girl who was mad at me tried to start a rumor that I was sleeping around. None of the other kids would believe her. That’s squeaky clean, because people love a good rumor. I knew what was going on, though—by high school I had used local libraries to research sex. I was the best-educated virgin around. Girls who were having sex came to me with questions, and nothing I heard from those girls made me feel like I was missing much.

A lot of girls seemed to be having sex not because they wanted to or even because they enjoyed it that much, but because they thought it would make them popular. Or, my least favorite reason, out of fear that their boyfriends would dump them if they didn’t. If he’s only there for sex, then you dump his ass. As for that whole popularity thing, let me tell you: The people pressuring you to do things you don’t want to do, or things you aren’t sure are safe to do, are not going to help you get into college. They aren’t going to help you get a job after high school. They aren’t going to baby-sit your child if you get pregnant. They aren’t going to hold your hand if you choose an abortion. They aren’t going to go to the doctor with you when you get diagnosed with gonorrhea or herpes. Anyone who says any of the following things is not your true friend: “Everyone’s doing it.” (No, they aren’t.) “It won’t hurt you.” “Just once won’t hurt.” (A lot of drug overdoses, drug addictions, unwanted pregnancies, and life-threatening diseases begin this way.) “If you don’t do it, I won’t like you anymore.” (They don’t like you now. They are using you and want to use you more.) “If you loved me, you’d have sex with me.” (If you loved me, you’d wait until I’m ready.) My rule on sex is six months. Tell the guy or girl (I’m hearing from more and more young men who are feeling pressured by girls) that if they want to date you, there is no chance for sex for six months. Trust me, the people who are just dating you to get in your pants won’t make it six months. The trick here is that if you date someone for six months without screwing, then you have to talk, you have to become friends. Real friends don’t use you, they care about you.

So I came through high school and most of college scoring pretty high on all those silly purity tests. Then I met the man of my dreams and I got married. Within the first year of our marriage, the things that would eventually drive us apart were already causing problems. But most of our life together was happy, and I was stupid-faced in love. That will get you through a lot.

What does this have to do with the book in your hands? Well, the fact that I chose for Anita to have sex in this book bothered my first husband a whole lot. He was adamantly against it. Now, understand that the last book he’d read of mine was Guilty Pleasures, so he had no idea what had been happening in all the books in between. His protest was not based on knowledge, but on morals. It was wrong to write about sex. He told me it would hurt the sales of my books if I did it. (He came back years later and apologized for that.) This next part is a spoiler, a serious spoiler, so if you haven’t actually read this book, stop reading now. Read this essay afterward. It is supposed to be an afterword, after all. Still with me? Fine: My first husband objected to Anita sleeping with a vampire. If I had to do it, then he thought it should be with Richard, the human, or more human, werewolf. He didn’t base this on knowledge of the characters or the books. He knew Richard only through my talking about him. Vampires were evil, so you didn’t have sex with them. Does his attitude remind any of you of someone else we used to know? Why, golly, Anita at the beginning of the series.

Remember in Guilty Pleasures how the world was very black and white? Vampires were only walking corpses and thus evil, and certainly not dating possibilities. The woman in that first book would never have dreamed of being with Jean-Claude. I’m not entirely sure she’d have even dated a werewolf, if she’d known what he was ahead of time. The books in between this beginning and book six were a time of change for Anita. She realized the world wasn’t so clear-cut. She and I met so many humans who seemed more monstrous than the monsters. It made it harder and harder to be clear on who the monsters were. My first husband didn’t take this journey with me. He didn’t read the books, and he put most of my research topics on the forbidden discussion list. Topics not allowed at the dinner table were: supernatural anything, violent crime, serial killers, any forensics details. It seems like there were more things that he didn’t want me to talk about, but that was the major stuff. In the beginning he wanted to stop talking about these topics during meals. I could sort of understand that—some of my research got pretty gruesome over the years. But the forbidden zone began to spread. Soon, these topics of conversation were on the list of things he never wanted me to talk about. In the years after The Killing Dance, we would add sex to the list, especially sex that deviated in any way from the “norm,” whatever that means.

Those of you who have read my books could almost have figured out what book I was writing by the topic I was researching. My then-husband could not. I began to talk less and less with him about work. A writer is always working, or at least I am. My internal life is very, very important to me. I did not realize that his choosing to be cut out of that internal life was hazardous to our marriage. It is only as I have started revisiting these books for these essays that I’ve realized just where the breakup began. It began in my imagination. It began because he wanted no part of it.

I became like some of the police I interviewed, living with a spouse who didn’t want to know what I did. That creates a feeling of growing isolation between you and your spouse. I do not equate what I do with real police work. My hat is off to all the women and men in blue and various other colors üf uniforms. They do a job that I could not do in real life. But it was interesting talking to them and hearing the echo of their marriages in my own. Some chose not to share the horrors of their job with their spouses, but many were not allowed to choose. Many were simply told, “That’s disgusting,” or, “That’s awful, why did you tell me that?” They had told because they needed to share it with someone. Sometimes you need to talk out the horror, like letting the poison out. Other times you need not to talk about it at all. There were some police whose spouses pestered them to talk about the had stuff. It was funny how often the men, and some women, would marry people who were the opposite of what they needed to feel better. Men who wanted to cope by being quiet were often married to women who bugged them to share. Men and women who wanted to share were married to people who didn’t want to know such things existed. As much as police love their jobs, and most of them do, they learn things every day that they wish they didn’t have to learn. Or maybe that’s just the ones I’ve been talking to. I can say, for my own part, that I had to stop the serial killer research. I know enough to write about t. I don’t need to keep up with the latest and sickest. I already know that my fellow human beings are capable of amazingly awful things. I know things that real people did to other real people that have left me scarred. I’ve only seen the photos, read about it. I cannot imagine seeing the real crime scenes, the real victims. I cannot imagine what you would do to cleanse yourself after something like that.

This book is the beginning of Anita’s sex life. It’s the beginning of a deeper commitment to Jean-Claude. While Anita was building her relationship, mine was falling apart. As I walked further into the darkness, my first love just didn’t want to go with me. He was entitled to his choice. If I had known then what I know now, would I have chosen differently? Would I have avoided the sex and the violence? Would I have tried to make my first husband more comfortable at the expense of my own creative life? Who knows. But I know one thing for certain: No matter how strongly I would have tried to stay away from the dark topics, I couldn’t have done it. I am attracted to things that most people see as frightening. My imagination sparks with the perverse, the violent, the sensuous. Writers do not choose their voice; it chooses them.

Because of what I write, a lot of people expect me to look Goth, or at least scary. For some I am too mainstream in appearance. They arc disappointed that I am not further out on the dark cutting edge in my presentation to the world. Let me tell you a secret: The inside of my head is so dark, so frightening, that short of really creative serial killers, or sexual sadists, I find nothing I haven’t already thought about. I come up with a half dozen ideas every year that are so awful I won’t put them down on paper. I’ll let the serial killers do their own research. Nothing in my books that can be done in this reality, without my magic system, is made up. I may change a few details, but it’s all stuff that people have actually done to each other. Now that should scare you all.

I don’t have to surround myself with black walls and frightening imagery to be inspired to write horror. I don’t need anything to make me think about scary things—I just do; I always have. I was once married to someone who made me feel bad about enjoying the dark stuff. He made me feel bad, and I let him do it. But you know what, the dark isn’t evil, it’s just dark. The choice between being good and being bad isn’t a one-time-only choice between black and white. It’s a choice that people make every day, every minute. We choose to be good. Remember the next time you see someone covered in tattoos, pierced all over, dressed in a scary black outfit, that the vast majority of serial killers would never dream of attracting that kind of negative attention. Look at the most normal person in line. The one who looks just like your neighbor or a favorite uncle. He’s more likely to be a serial killer or a child molester. The old adage “Never judge a book by its cover” is very, very true. More true than you want it to be.

Hamilton, Laurell K. (2005) Foreward. The Killing Dance (1997). Berkley Publishing Group. New York.