The Symbolic Potential of the Hybrid: Anita Blake and Horror and Vampire Literature

Human imagination is saturated with monsters. They represent, in a number of ways, those that have been historically perceived as strangers to the human community. It is a game of alterities wherein female monsters have occupied a particularly relevant position. Women have been historically represented as the Other in this human/nonhuman dyad. In the present study nineteenth- and twentieth-century vampires and zombies narratives have guided the analysis of a contemporary neo-gothic artefact: Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter by Laurell K. Hamilton. This book argues at the intersection of feminist literary analysis and cultural studies methodology, and it also considers queer notions of fluidity and performativity. The author sets out that Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter represents a twenty-first-century series questioning social norms and envisioning worlds of freedom.