Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris


Sookie Stackhouse, cleavage-showing and nicely-tanned ,waitress extraordinaire, lives a boring life...for the most part. Aside from her unique gift of being able to read minds, her life borders on the uninteresting and bland, until a sexy vampire named Bill wanders into the bar looking for some bottled synthetic blood.

You see in Louisiana, vampires are "out of the coffin" so to speak. She's intrigued. Who wouldn't be by a walking cold corpse I say. But she likes him instantly because his mind is as quiet as...well, death.

Upon his arrival, bad things start to happen. Big, ugly, bloody murders. People seem to be dying left and right. Could it be Bill? Sookie wonders, or the new trio of vampire nesters that have deposited themselves in the town, much to the locals dismay. Or maybe it's someone else entirely like her mysterious boss who currently has the hots for her as well. When her wayward brother is suspected, Sookie means to solve these murders on her own, with or without her dead-slash-suspect boyfriend.

I hoped she hadn't dropped her health insurance in these harsh economic times.

I thought the plot would be simple enough. Big strong male rescues female. Again. But it turned out slightly different than I thought it would. Overall I guess, this book was entertaining enough to fall into my quick-read category. I like stories that take place in the South. Stories with an atmosphere so thick I can hear that Southern twanginess in my mind when I read the dialogue.

While I would say, "Sookie" (think cookie), vampire Bill would say, "Soo-kay," with long drawn out, silky syllables that come out so smoothly, you're not sure if he said sex or Sookie.

I found this cover interesting, I might even call it cute. Innocent. Almost cartoonish, perhaps for a younger audience, but the only thing innocent about this book is.....hmm, I can't think of anything. Whole lots of blood oozing, blood sucking, death, burned-up stinky bodies, and sexiness all rolled into a big pot of shrimp gumbo. So if you like ah, shrimp gumbo then by all means, eat. 3 stars

2 comments:

TheBlackSheep said...

That's an odd cover to choose for such a book. I'd assumed it was a children's book and was a little shocked when you started your post with the cleavage showing. Interesting the images some people choose.

L said...

Same here! I'd not read them at all and then I saw TruBlood on HBO and I thought, hmm, these must be more adult than I thought! So I decided to read them, and they are much tamer than the tv show but not for kids, or even teens in any way, in my humble opinion.

All good bloody fun. Literally.