Dead Until Dark

Since True Blood is a lot of fun to watch, I have begun reading the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. The first is entitled Dead Until Dark. The approach the TV show has taken is not what I would hope for if I were a diehard fan of something (that is to say I hope David and Dan stay truer to aSoIaF than True Blood does to these novels) but I do think that in this instance it works well.

The overall story arc of the first novel and the first season of True Blood are fairly similar. In both cases we start and end in the nearly the same places, and most of the subplots are, if not exactly the same at least maintain the integrity of the story. Where we find a lot of divergence is in characters and characterization. This has a lot to do with the fact that the novels are written in the first person and have a heavy introspective component, these two things would not work well for TV!

Thus Dead Until Dark is focused much more tightly around Sookie, and we only see the events from her perspective. It takes much longer in the novel to get a feel for the characters around Sookie. In fact with the exception of Bill and possibly Sam the other secondary characters are much further developed by the end of the first season of True Blood than they are by the end of Dead Until Dark. This is not a bad thing, it is merely the result of changing from novel form to TV and all of the adjustments required therein.

To be honest Sookie, as portrayed in True Blood, annoys me quite a lot. This I believe has to do with the lack of her inner dialogs that we have available in the novels. Sookie’s character is played much as she projects herself to other people in the novels. That is to say the novel Sookie realizes that being a young, curvy, blonde in the South gets her typecast as a bit of an airhead, or at least less smart than your average bear. She uses this knowledge quite effectively to her advantage by playing up that image while actually being intelligent about things. In True Blood, all the viewer gets is the played up dumb blonde act, without the benefit of Sookie’s true thoughts, and as a result she doesn’t come across as a sympathetic character.

I have not read very much “urban fantasy” prior to this novel, just one or two random things and I guess you might call the later Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles novels urban fantasy, but I think they may be more of a predecessor to the sub-genre. Urban fantasy is not my favorite of the sub-genre’s but it can be a fun interlude between weightier reads. That is exactly what Dead Until Dark is.

Harris writes in a very concise and quick moving style. We only discover facts and background about each character in glimpses and snippets that are important to the immediate plot line. As a result this is a very quick read. I wouldn’t say it’s an edge of your seat kind of story, but the writing style keeps things moving fast enough that you never lose interest. I give Dead Until Dark a 3.5/5.