First published in 1994.
Thickness: 301 pages
Read in dutch
Personal rating: 3 stars
In short
Harold Gaynor offers Anita Blake a million dollars to raise a 300-year-old zombie. Knowing it means a human sacrifice will be necessary, Anita turns him down. But when dead bodies start turning up, she realizes that someone else has raised Harold's zombie--and that the zombie is a killer. Anita pits her power against the zombie and the voodoo priestess who controls it.
In The Laughing Corpse Anita will learn that there are some secrets better left buried-and some people better off dead... (www.goodreads.com)
My two cents
I liked The Laughing corpse because it is what it is. Mindless reading fun. Books about vampires and other nasties are always easy to deliver and the Anita Blake series does just that for me. I've had problems with the twilight franchise because of the weak protagonist, but Anita is far from weak and does remind me of another great hero, Buffy Summers. Both emerged in vampires and both trying to cope with it.
In this volume Anita is trying to find a quite psychopathic zombie and it's animator. Meanwhile the master of the town is trying to lure her in as his human servant. On top of that a millionaire is moving to persuade her to rise a zombie which will need a human sacrifice. A whole lot going on so the story line is never faltering and boring.
The title is a bit odd. A night club named the Laughing corpse is mentioned but plays an almost insignificant part. Also the zombie involved in lot of the story couldn't be described as laughing. But what's in a title? I liked the novel and I do recommend this to other vampire/zombie/ghoul lovers out there.
On to the next I'd say, although I'm going to read an Stephen King novel first!! :)
