First, let there be a spoiler warning: OMGSPOILERS, y’all! There. You’ve been warned. Continue at your own risk.

Okay, so, first up, since it’ll be quick, I snagged the newest Anita Blake: Vampire Fucker novella by Laurell K. Hamilton, Flirt, last night, and read the whole thing. It’s pretty short, just under 200 pages. And … I think I love this story, people. Okay, truth in advertising, it was the same tedious, angsty, Mary Sue crap that an Anita novel always is, but … there was necromancy in this one! Squee! Zombtacular mayhem! That’s totally worth the ten bucks for the Kindle edition, right there.

The story is pretty basic. Anita meets with a customer who wants his wife’s corpse raised, and came to Anita because he wants the corpse to look human, and not know that it’s dead, which Anita can do. It’s insinuated that the ludicrously rich client may want his wife’s corpse for icky necrophiliac purposes. Bleh. Anita is also appropriately squicked out, because apparently banging the undead corpse of a vampire is acceptable, but not the undead corpse of a zombie that is at least as human-looking and self-aware as a vampire. Yeah, I know. I was all, “Pot, meet Kettle” with that one, too.

Said client doesn’t like being told no, so he hires a mercenary team of werelions to abduct Anita, and hold her harem of menfolk hostage via sniper team. (Sniper werelions, folks. I know, right?) The deal is this: raise the wife, and they’ll turn Anita and the harem loose unharmed. There’s some fighting between Anita and the werelions, resulting in Anita being too metaphysically weak to actually raise any dead — good job, guys — to the mercenary team — no, get this, it’s great — decides to let Anita nail one of their team members so she can feed, and then do the zombie raising thing.

At this point, I’m all like, “Oh, awesome, I’ll bet the rest of this book is all Anita angsting about Anita using her metaphysical hoochie powers to totally roll this gimp and make him her slave, and then use him against his team mates.” But no! I was amazed! There was, like, two paragraphs of Anita thinking, “Well, this is wrong, but oh fucking well,” and then she turned the werelion into her lil’ bitch with the might of her vaginamancy. Awesome! Then, then, Anita raises the wife, gets the goonsquad called off her boyfriends, and — this is the part that’s worth the bucks, y’all — raises the whole fucking cemetery and has her zombie hordes eat the fucking bad guys. Ate them. Bones and all. Zom nom nom.

It. Was. Awesome.

I’m reading this, propped up in bed while Jim is asleep next to me, and I’m fist-punching the air going, “Yes! Necromancy! Finally!” Jim’s all like, “Not now, love, I have to be up early.” Okay, I’m kidding about that. I didn’t actually wake him up, and if I had, he probably would have been totally down with necromancy.

There’s even a neat little bit where Anita — finally — looks around at her undead hordes of minions and thinks, “Man, I could be Zombie Queen of the Universe, and turn the world into a smoking crater crawling with flesh-eating hordes under my sole command.” And I’m all like, “YES! DO EEEEET!” And Anita’s all like, “But that would be wrong and bad.” And I’m all like, “God damn it!” So that was a bit of a let-down.

But, all told, not a bad story. Also, the book comes with a little “How I Write” essay at the end and some cute cartoons by some webcomic gal I’ve never heard of. You do get the cartoons with the Kindle edition, by the way.