I’m sure he saves her life a bunch of times too, can’t remember, doesn’t matter anyway. Secondly: On their first encounter, Sookie saves the life of Bill the Vampire (Yes, Bill, how is that for self-irony?). Moreover, she is not the least bit intimidated to use that beauty (read sexiness) to try to charm a handsome vampire. Like really? What is with all these teen-age novels with girls who go around and think that they are plain, and then all of a sudden, they come to find out that they had been pretty all along? Doesn’t happen, ‘mkay? No, Sookie is pretty (read sexy) and totally aware of it. And thank you for finally giving me a female character who is not completely oblivious to her own beauty. But the characters are, and so is the tone.įirst of all, Sookie, the protagonist, the heroine, is not so much a girl, rather than a grown woman. Okay, so the story is not a whole lot more sophisticated that Twilight. Where Stephanie Meyer’s narrative is flat and predictable, Charlaine Harris takes things to a new level.
So far, same, right? But then there is more. There is, of course, a jealous but benign male friend, who every once in a while, morphs into a large canine.
There are some good-for-nothing cops standing no chance against the super natural. There are some bad guys which said Vampire needs to protect her from. Yeah, same story basically: Human Girl and Vampire fall in love in small town America. Having completely expected a Twilight knock-off, only taking place in far-from-sexy, northern Louisiana instead of the cool and environmentally conscious Olympic Peninsula in the Evergreen State, I was pleasantly surprised, already a few pages in when I realized that this novel yielded a self-ironic, mature and sassy tone that Twilight completely lacks. I didn’t feel any particular need to widen my vamp-lit repertoire, and I added Charlaine Harris’s Dead until Dawn to my reading list, mostly as an ironic afterthought, when moving to the South. Oh, and I sped through Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Killer as if being chased by an angry village mob with pitchforks and burning torches.
Then I read the Twilight novels a few years later, when the first (and maybe second) movie had already both invaded and abandoned the theaters for an undead existence on Netflix.
I read Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire when I was like twenty, mostly because it felt like a novel I should have read considering the amount of black clothes and white make-up I wore back then. And when I did, I bought a third-class ticket and only traveled a couple of stations down the line. So I was late to get on the vampire novel train. Dead until Dark, by Charlaine Harris – Just another Twilight knock-off.
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