Circus of the Damned
core novel 1995 Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter
Record
| First published | 1995 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.17 (97,938 ratings, collected 2026-08-26) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780441001972 |
| Internal chronology | 3 |
Synopsis
Circus of the Damned is the third novel in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. Anita meets the werewolf Richard Zeeman, a schoolteacher living a double life, and begins a relationship with him that offers her the possibility of a more ordinary romance away from the vampire politics that have increasingly dominated her life. That hope is complicated when a rival master vampire, Alejandro, forcibly marks Anita as his servant during a confrontation at the titular circus, a vampire-run entertainment venue with secrets of its own, pulling her further into a dangerous struggle for power among St. Louis's master vampires. Caught between her growing feelings for Richard, her unresolved ties to Jean-Claude, and the new threat posed by Alejandro's claim on her, Anita must navigate an increasingly tangled web of supernatural politics while trying to keep her own life and independence intact.
Where it sits
- Universe: Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter
- Series: Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter core; position 3 of 30 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Laurell K. Hamilton
Notes
- From the series record (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter): The long-running main sequence, mixing full novels and a few shorter novellas, following vampire hunter and necromancer Anita Blake; still active as of the latest update.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: position 3 of 30: previous The Laughing Corpse (1994) · next The Lunatic Cafe (1996)
Sources
← Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.