Anita Katerine Blake is the main heroine and the narrator of the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series of novels, short stories, and comics by Laurell K. Hamilton. The only part of the series she hasn't appeared in this far is the short story Selling Houses.
Anita is a young woman who lives in St. Louis. Anita Blake is a petite woman of mixed German and Mexican heritage with curly long raven hair and pale skin with scars scattered over her body. She is very direct and flippant in her speech, but is said to be highly competent in the professions she is involved in. Her night job, and primary source of income, is the legal profession of re-animating the dead. As an animator, her job entails using magical abilities to bring temporary life to dead bodies as zombies in order to e.g. question them for legal purposes. She isn't just a run-of-the-mill animator, though, as she is powerful enough to become a necromancer. This allows her deeper and wider control over the dead, including to some extent even vampires and zombies raised by other people.
Unlike most animators, Anita is also held in retainer as a preternatural consultant for the Regional Preternatural Investigation Taskforce, which handles crimes involving magic, vampires, lycanthropes, and other preternatural creatures. She is also a licensed vampire hunter/executioner in her own right, which sometimes gives her a wider range of possibilities than the police have at their disposal. Later, Anita gets empowered as a Federal Marshal, which broadens the range of her responsibilities but also makes her job easier in many ways.
Killing a vampire is murder, other than when there are legal exceptions. As a jail couldn't hold a vampire, breaking the law means a warrant of execution for that vampire and any accomplices, human and vampire alike. The warrant doesn't necessarily specify which vampire is the culprit, making the vampire hunter the sole judge, jury, and executioner for those involved. For some people the vampire hunter license largely means morgue stakings after the rogue vampire has already been caught and restrained, but others such as Anita do their own tracking down and killing in the field. This earned her early on a nickname among the vampires: The Executioner.
A strong protagonist in the series, Anita is very direct and can come across as rude, and is considered highly competent in the professions she is involved in. She is trained in judo and kenpo, and knows how to use several weapons, including blades, but is most proficient with guns. As the series begins, the Browning Hi-Power is her carry gun of choice, though later in the series she switches to the Browning BDM.
History[]
Anita was raised Catholic, but didn't go to a Catholic school. Her formative experiences appear to be a series of traumas. In particular, Anita has never fully recovered from her mother's death. (In The Laughing Corpse, she is upset that no one protects the niece and nephew of John Burke at their father's funeral when their mother is hysterical and throws herself on the coffin). After her father remarried, Anita did not feel she "fit in" with her blond father, stepmother, stepsister, and half-brother. Anita clashed with Judith over her "unladylike" interests, independence, and necromancy, and Judith was always quick to tell others that Anita was only a stepdaughter with a Mexican mother.
Anita's powers manifested during adolescence, causing various dead animals to reanimate and visit Anita's home, including her pet dog. Embarrassed, Anita's father asked her maternal grandmother, Grandmother Flores, to teach Anita how to "turn off" her abilities. Flores believed that training a necromancer in vaudun ritual would lead to evil and encouraged Anita to remain Roman Catholic. Later, when the Pope excommunicated all animators, Anita became an Episcopalian.
Anita majored in preternatural biology in college, earning a bachelor's degree. While in college, her rich fiancee's parents convinced him to break their engagement because Anita's mother was Mexican. Hurt, Anita decided to forego additional sexual experiences until marriage. While there she accidentally raised a teacher that had committed suicide, who sought her out in her dorm room, which caused her roommate to switch rooms.
After graduating at the age of 21, Anita was recruited by Bert Vaughn to join Animators, Inc. as a professional zombie animator. This brought her into contact with Ronnie Sims, a private detective, and Catherine Maison, a lawyer, both of whom she befriended. Anita was trained in the job by a fellow animator, Manny Rodriguez, who was also a licensed vampire executioner and taught Anita the ropes of that trade as well. She got her own license shortly thereafter.
At some point Anita became associated with a bounty hunter called Edward, and two years before the beginning of the series (events described in The First Death) she, Manny, and Edward were involved in at least one dicey confrontation with vampires—a battle against Valentine and his pack that landed Anita in a hospital with her arm in traction. She recovered with the help of physical therapy, but was left with a number of severe scars and a cross-shaped brand on her arm, put there by human thralls of the vampires.
Even after becoming a licensed vampire executioner, Anita considers herself first and foremost an animator. In the first novel we learn she'd killed fourteen vampires before the series began, most of them with an actual stake and a hammer, with at least some of those likely to be morgue stakings. Her nickname given to her by vampires, The Executioner, is a reference to the fact that she does her own hunting, rather than waiting for law enforcement to capture the vampire. As this doesn't appear to be an unusual practice among the early licensed vampire hunters, the nickname is possibly also a warning to not underestimate her based on her appearance—even if she didn't have much vampire hunting experience under her belt at that point.
Family[]
Anita's mother died in a car accident when Anita was eight. Her father remarried a few years after, and had a son, Josh. The stepmother, Judith, also had a daughter, Andria, from a previous relationship.
The extended family includes at least Aunt Mattie, Grandmother Blake, Grandmother Flores, great-aunt Katerine, who died when Anita was a small child, great-uncle Otto, who is also dead but Anita still remembers his accent, and great-aunt Gertrude, who reportedly nagged Uncle Otto to death.