HBO | A love affair...

Written by Charlaine Harris
Series: The Sookie Stackhouse Novels (aka The Southern Vampire Mysteries)

Book #17 of 2012

Dead Until Dark

Nationality: U.S.
Publisher: Ace Books
First Edition: 2001
My Edition: 2009
Original Language: English

This lovely little surprise of a book came to me by recommendation of a friend of mine, Ms. Sally. Being that she is a friend from church, I was a little surprised to find out that it has a TV show based on the series that airs on HBO (that, gasp, my husband also happens to own). So naturally, I took a week to watch the first two seasons that we had on DVD. I DO NOT KNOW WHY IT TOOK ME SO LONG TO WATCH THOSE! SO GOOD! The show was very different from the book. So different that I’m not going to do a compare and contrast. They were just different and should be thought of as such. And I digress.

The story is about a telepathic waitress named Sookie Stackhouse from Bon Temps, Louisiana who finds peace with (and falls in love with) a vampire named William (Bill) Compton, who was turned during the Civil War. There is a string of murders in her small town and she wonders… is she next?

Bill is a pretty entertaining character. You don’t learn everything about him all at once. He is a mystery. An onion, so to say. Layer after cold, clammy, vampire layer. He is a “mainstreamer” – a vampire who doesn’t want to kill anymore, so they pull away from other vampires to live with humans and drink synthetic blood called “Tru Blood”. They describe vampires as “forgetting” their humanity – becoming animals who live off of instinct. Bill desperately wanted to change.

For awhile I taped soap operas and watched them at night when I thought I might be forgetting what it was like to be human. After a while I stopped, because from the examples I saw on those shows, forgetting humanity was a good thing.

Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) is the main character of the series. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sookie is a sweetheart. She loves her Gran, and her brother Jason (nevermind the fact that he’s a womanizing idiot), she goes to church, works really hard, doesn’t judge people by what the media says about them, and keeps a smile on her face even in the worst of circumstances. She’s deeply intellectual, even though she doesn’t regard herself as such. She sees the world for what it is, and doesn’t sugar-coat anything. Honestly, Sookie doesn’t really have the luxury to sugar-coat life – she hears peoples’ thoughts. When she begins to get involved with Bill, her life changes dramatically. The vampires Bill associate with take a dangerous interest in Sookie, and she has to learn how to navigate her way through.

The world seemed a bad and terrible place, all its denizens suspect, and I the lamb wandering through the valley of death with a bell around my neck.

Personally, I think she handles herself really well.

I will definitely be reading this entire series. I heard the last in the series is being released May 2013. This is a perfect quick-novel series to read ~~back to back to back to back~~ in between other longer novels. :)

Happy reading, friends!