Living Dead in Dallas

Charlaine Harris’ second entry in the Southern Vampire Mysteries is entitled Living Dead in Dallas. This novel finds Sookie drafted by Eric to use here telepathic powers to solve a crime in a neighboring vampire district. This is partly due to a promise Sookie made in Dead Until Dark, but also partly due to Bill’s new status as a vampire investigator. The investigation takes them to Dallas, and Sookie for the first time interacts with the larger vampire world.

In Dead Until Dark we are only introduced to vampires, shape-shifters, and telepaths. Living Dead in Dallas reveals the fact that in the Sookie-verse pretty much any legend, myth, or nightmare is probably true. In this novel we encounter more shape-shifters, werewolves, another telepath, a maenad, and of course lots of vampires. From this novel I get the sense that this setting, with all the things that go bump in the night, is going to be a fun little place to play.

While, like Dead Until Dark and season one of True Blood, the overall storyline starts and ends much the same season two of True Blood made some major changes. Again a lot of this is due too the novels being told from Sookie’s point of view and the show being more of an ensemble. Another reason for this divergence is the fact that these novels are short and fast moving. If True Blood stayed word perfect to the novels it would probably only be able to get 4 or 5 episodes out of each novel.

In truth I liked the pacing and results of Living Dead in Dallas much more than I liked season two of True Blood. Again this goes back to the narrative style of the novels. The Dallas plot takes place first with only Sookie, Bill, and Eric involved and for the show this would have left a lot of favorite characters hanging for about six of the episodes. So in order to sort this out the maenad story line was dragged out over all 12 episodes, and it just wasn’t that good of a plot line. The novel not only handles that story in an almost completely different matter, but starts it up and then doesn’t go back to it until the very end keeping the whole deal mercifully brief.

Living Dead Until Dark introduces a lot of new lore and helps to flesh out the structure of the vampire world. We learn that there are things bigger and badder than a vampire. The Fellowship of the Sun is also introduced. The Fellowship is a good foil to use to both make the vampires seem less evil and also to comment on the abuses of religious ideals and political conservatism.

I like the fact that Harris does not try to make these novels more than they are. The story arcs are brief and the mysteries are resolved without a lot of CSI style investigation, which is good because that is not what these novels are about. Shorter novels rarely catch my attention because I often don’t feel like getting to know a character and then moving on so soon, but as Harris already has several novels out it’s not quite so bad. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. I give it a 3.5/5.