Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris

Sorry all you tens of readers out there. I haven't blogged for a week. I'm currently reading The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson and it seems to be taking me a while to get through it. So, I thought I would honor the new True Blood season currently airing Sunday evenings on HBO by talking today about Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris. I will do my best to separate the TV show from the book because there are differences.

First, a bit of background since this is the second installment in Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novel series. Our heroine, Sookie, is a waitress in Bon Temps, Louisiana. Sookie is not like other girls. She can read minds, a gift that she really doesn't enjoy. The world these novels inhabit is rife with supernatural creatures. At the forefront are the vampires who have recently "come out of the coffin". Due to a new synthetic blood called True Blood, the vampires as a community have chosen to enter mainstream society and make themselves known. There are also shape shifters (Sookie's boss, Sam, likes to turn into a collie), maenads, werewolves and who knows what else. Sookie is in love with a vampire by the name of Bill Compton who was turned vampire during the Civil War.

The book opens with a murder. Lafayette, the fry cook at the bar where Sookie works is found dead in Sheriff Andy's car. No one knows what happened, least of all Andy who was actually in the bar tying one on at the time of the murder. Sookie, as usual, feels it's her duty to find the killer. Why the police force in Bon Temps is so incompetent, I don't know.

In the midst of Sookie's investigation/snoopiness, Eric Northman, current vampire sheriff of Louisiana, 1000 year old former viking, proprietor of Fangtasia, the hottest vampire bar in Louisiana, and uber hottie (Exhibit A)

sends Sookie on a telepathy assignment to Dallas, Texas. It seems a local Dallas vampire has gone missing and they need Sookie's special powers to help find him. Bill accompanies her.

As usual, Sookie gets herself in all kinds of trouble. She discovers that a local anti-vampire church has kidnapped the missing Dallas vampire and is planning to sacrifice him at dawn in a ceremony called "meeting the sun". In other words, the vampire will be tied to a stake and left out to burn when the sun rises while a bunch of vampire haters cheer. Sookie offers to infiltrate the church in order to get information but the church has been tipped off to Sookie's affiliations and she finds herself kidnapped too and added to the morning's sacrificial festivities.

Will Sookie escape the clutches of the anti-vampire church? Will Sookie save the vampire from meeting the sun? Will Sookie solve Lafayette's murder? Will we ever get to see Eric in the spandex disguise at the end of the book on the TV show? I know the answers but I'm not talking. Read the book lazy bones!

It goes without saying that Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels are not deep reading. These aren't books that future literary scholars are going to be studying. BUT, they are fun. The characters are wacky and the world Harris has created is captivating. You have to wonder what supernatural creature Harris is going to pull out of her bag of tricks next.

However, I found the story in this novel a little weak, at least compared to the first novel in the series, Dead Until Dark. It was really two stories in one: Lafayette's murder and Sookie's assignment in Dallas. The two were completely unrelated and created a disjointed storyline. Harris obviously didn't have enough meat on either story so she just combined them into one book. I can't fault her that. Overall, I give Living Dead in Dallas 3 1/2 bows It's not Shakespeare but it's fun, mindless reading. I highly recommend it for the beach or pool. Happy reading everyone!