Prolific author Laurell K. Hamilton knows her vampires

Back when Buffy was just a self-absorbed cheerleader, Sookie Stackhouse was having play dates with living humans and the "Twilight" kids were mere embryos, there was Anita Blake.

The literary necromancer/vampire hunter/federal marshal returned to bookstore shelves Tuesday with "Skin Trade" (Berkley, $26.95). And, on Friday, Blake's creator, author Laurell K. Hamilton, will visit Las Vegas for a talk and book signing at the Clark County Library.

If this book-and-author twofer isn't sufficient bliss for Southern Nevada's legions of Hamilton fans, there's this: "Skin Trade," the 17th entry in Hamilton's "Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter" series, begins when Blake receives a grisly package that leads her to, yes, Las Vegas.

It's about time. After all, Blake already has visited Branson, Mo. (in "Bloody Bones," the series' fifth entry).

"She comes to Vegas to hunt the only serial killer that got away," explains Hamilton, a charming woman with a soft voice and dry sense of humor, during a recent phone interview. "And, from the moment he got away, I thought he was going to show up in Las Vegas."

"You are kind of a mecca for anything unusual. That's how people perceive Las Vegas."

But image-conscious Las Vegans needn't worry. "I love Vegas," Hamilton says. "You have all that glitz and glamour and are kind of allowed to be a loud, sexy version of an adult Disney World.

"And you have the other side of Vegas, which is off the Strip, which is actually where most people live. You have the ordinary neighborhoods, the same kind of stores in the world you have outside the Strip, nobody gets to see that."

Hamilton has, and it's a testament to how seriously she takes her work that she not only has gotten to know Las Vegas during several visits over the years -- she and her husband even honeymooned here -- but that her research for "Skin Trade" included a tour of the Clark County Coroner's office and a visit with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department's SWAT unit.

Hamilton writes on her blog about her cool coroner's office souvenirs, and says her visit with SWAT prompted her to "rewrite about a third" of "Skin Trade" to reflect the updated technologies and procedures she learned about there.

"I'm very serious about my research," says Hamilton, who still smarts over an Uzi-related error that made it into an earlier book (but which, she adds, was corrected in the subsequent paperback version).

"My thing is, if you're asking people to believe vampires, zombies and ghouls, you'd better make sure your reality is absolutely as real as you can make it," she says.

"What I find is, somebody who's reading will accept vampires, they will accept zombies and they will accept weretigers -- in Vegas it has to be were-tigers, right? -- but, then, it comes to real life -- a gun detail, a street, a place they know or a topic they have experience with -- if you're wrong, it throws them out of the book and they won't believe the monsters after that."

Hamilton has been surprised by just how seriously some readers take her novels. That realization first hit home on a book tour during which some fans assailed her for -- not to give away the details -- ending a relationship between two characters.

Oddly enough, some readers insisted on characterizing the breakup in a way Hamilton hadn't remembered writing it. Halfway through the tour, Hamilton felt compelled to reread the book herself to make sure she correctly recalled what had happened.

"That was my wake-up call that people felt very personal and possessive of the characters," Hamilton says.

"What I find is, I enjoy talking with fans because nobody but me really thinks about the characters as this real. I didn't anticipate that until (that) happened. The downside to that is, when the books don't go the direction (they) want, they're upset."

In addition to the Anita Blake series, Hamilton writes the Merry Gentry series of urban fantasy novels, which explore the intersection of modern-day fairy and real-life worlds.

The Gentry series, built upon a sort of contrarian view of classic fairy tale conventions, was "supposed to be a break for Anita and turned into another best-selling series," Hamilton says. The eighth book in the series will hit bookstores in the fall.

Hamilton is surprised not only by how avidly readers have embraced Anita Blake -- more than 6 million copies of the novels are in print worldwide, and IFC tv this summer begins filming the first Anita Blake TV movie -- but of how successful the literary genre she pioneered has become.

"What's amazing is, when I tried to sell the first Anita Blake novel, I was turned down by every publisher you can imagine," she says. Mystery publishers thought it to be horror, horror publishers figured it for science fiction, and science fiction publishers viewed it as fantasy.

"Everyone loved it," Hamilton says, "but no one knew what to do with it."

Today, hard-edged, contemporary, adult-oriented vampire novels featuring strong female protagonists is an established subgenre of horror fiction. And if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Hamilton jokes, "I'm about as flattered as I want to be."

Actually, Hamilton finds herself vexed only by "people who only seem to be writing it because it's selling, and their heart obviously is not in it."

"This is what I always wanted to write. This is where my heart is," Hamilton says. "I'm not writing it because it sells. It's because this is what I've wanted to write since I was 13 years old."

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.