Review, Dead Until Dark

Pre-info: this is the series that helped make the HBO TV series TrueBlood. 

 

    Prod dets

Dead Until Dark

Series: Sookie Stackhouse series, book 1

Pub: 2001, Gollancz

Author: Charlaine Harris

Cat: paranormal fiction (mystery)

Format: paperback (mid); 326 pp w/ 12 chapters

Age Range: Adults                                            

            Synopsis

Sookie Stackhouse is a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. She’s quiet, keeps to herself, and doesn’t get out much. Not because she’s not pretty. She is. It’s just that, well, Sookie has this sort of ‘disability’. She can read minds. And that doesn’t make her too dateable. And then along comes Bill: he’s tall, dark and handsome – and Sookie can’t ‘hear’ a word he’s thinking. He’s exactly the type of guy she’s been waiting for all her life.

    

But Bill has a disability of his own: He’s a vampire. Worse than that, he hangs with a seriously creepy crowd, with a reputation for trouble – of the murderous kind.

    

And when one of Sookie’s colleagues is killed, she begins to fear she’ll be next...

     Thoughts

Okay, so this one is a little hard for me to re-read, mostly because I first read the book while I was high on morphine and laying in a hospital bed with massive tubes hanging out off my chest. So it’s unfortunate to say that it gives me a little bit of flashbacks. It was brought for me by my mother as a ‘Glad you made it out of surgery’ that too and I was a lot further away from home at this time and no one could come and visit me as much.

 

I have read it another time before this one, and that was the worse, this time round I could push myself out of it, a bit, but still it’s only been two years since I had my lung cavity scraped and even though I’m doing better than most people in this situation (I’m completely off any pain killers) it’s still to fresh. And yet, for this I pushed myself past it all (if only this was a fear...)

I found that, and this was both time to be honest but the first one I thought it was because of the drugs, that I didn’t particularly enjoy it. I mean I continued with the series, so it’s safe to say there was something that kept pushing me threw (I think mostly that my brother bought me the second book—for the same reason as my mum, a glad you’re not dead thing. but if I had read only this book I don’t believe that I would have continued with the series, which is kinda said, because it’s a great series to read.

But then, thinking on it, most people have watched the series, and if not, it’s not that great a loss, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself because I’ve watched series 1 and have refused myself from continuing since I watched something that said Harris was finishing this series soon, and so, why try and keep both separate in my mind and yet both there when I could just wait a year or two and then start the series.

My chose, and I know it’s good, my sister tells me all the shit that’s happening in it, so really, I should just start watching it, shouldn’t I?

Anyway I’m babbling about a lot of shit and not talking about the one this I should. The book. but here’s the thing, I don’t care about it, it’s unfortunate that it’s turned out that way, but I’m in no way a fan of Bill and I haven’t been, right from this start, he just rubs me the wrong way, he has right from the start, there’s just something about his character that I can’t like, and he’s a hug part of this book, so....

It also goes into the world around them, the fact that vampires are out of the closest. They decided to go out because of a bottled blood the Japanese made. But only vampires are out there, were-animals aren’t.

So Sookie has this ability to read people minds (and for this, the most annoying part of the series, like really, she bitches all the time about the fact that she can’t date because she can hear what they are thinking, that she gets annoyed, or sick when she hears what people have to say about how she looks as she walks past, and it’s been like this since she was a kid, and yet she dresses in a way that’s eye catching—make sense to anyone else? it’s my thing, and one of the only things in the series that annoys the shit out of me, but honestly she only thinks it once throughout the book you are reading—though this one, I think the whole mind reading thing is much higher.

She meets a vampire—Bill—who she can’t read, and for some reason falls madly in love with him on that sighting, nah, really it’s not that bad, I just can’t stand Bill, really, you have no idea how much he annoys me, really, really!!! They end up going out, she meets more vampires, they meet her, find out what she can do and then use her. Though they tell her that’s what they are doing, so that’s okay, right?

Here I’m going to stop, mostly because I’m getting into this thing that will spoil shit for everyone, since what I’ve spoken off comes out of the series as well, and I’m just going to assume that you’ve seen it. though I will say this, if you haven’t, start with the books, I think that if I had been a straight watching I wouldn’t have found the series as great because all we get from the books are her point of view, and much less sex, really, dull as shit, when you think about what happens in the TV show.

Anyway, enough of this, I’m sorry if this review wasn’t great, but it’s a series that seems to be all over the place when it comes to what’s what, and for the fact that I wasn’t a fan of this first book, well, it makes for an uninteresting read. No, that’s not fair, it was actually an interesting read, I just found it flat and boring, but then, a lot of memory is added for me that won’t be for you. Though if you decided that I’m right, continue on anyway, really, the series is a great read, and it deserves the time, it’s just a slow start.

Series

[tb], Living Dead in Dallas, Club Dead, Dead to the World, Dead as a Doornail, Definitely Dead, All Together Dead, From Dead to Worse, Dead and Gone, Dead in the Family, Dead Reckoning, Deadlocked

☼☼☼