Dead Until Dark

Title: Dead Until Dark
Author: Charlaine Harris
Pages: 292
Genre: Fantasy, Mystery
Rating: 4.5/5

Sookie Stackhouse is a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. She’s quiet, keeps to herself, and doesn’t get out much. Not because she’s not pretty. She is. It’s just that, well, Sookie has this sort of “disability.” She can read minds. And that doesn’t make her too dateable. And then along comes Bill. He’s tall, dark, handsome – and Sookie can’t hear a word he’s thinking. He’s exactly the type of guy she’s been waiting for all her life…

But Bill has a disability of his own: he’s a vampire with a bad reputation. He hangs with a seriously creepy crowd, all suspected of – big surprise – murder. And when one of Sookie’s coworkers is killed, she fears she’s next…

I’m assuming most have heard of the hit HBO series True Blood, and I’m assuming most of you are also aware that True Blood is based off of the Sookie Stackhouse series, a.k.a. The Southern Vampire Mysteries series. I’m now officially a fan of both.

I’m really glad I watched the first season of True Blood before reading Dead Until Dark. It makes it much easier to hear the characters voices in my head, and picture them. I normally like being able to make this all up myself, but I don’t mind it this time around. Probably because I don’t want to imagine another pathetically tragic Edward. Because this is much, much better than Twilight.

I like that the book wasted no time and got straight to the point. It moves much faster than the TV series, but there’s more time spent getting to know the characters and other small, invented sub-plots on the TV series. One of the things I missed in Dead Until Dark was Tara, and Lafayette. Lafayette exists in Dead Until Dark, but doesn’t play much of a role.

Harris has a unique writing style when it comes to the internal dialogue of Sookie. I didn’t feel like it was the typical internal thoughts found in most fictional books – it was much, much more realistic and personal.

One thing I feared was that it would turn into something a little too Anita Blake. Which is to say, sex, sex, and more sex. But it’s not like that at all.

I would recommend Dead Until Dark (and most likely the entire series) to anyone who already watches True Blood, or anyone who’s a fan of vampire fiction.