Review: Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

Dead Until Dark
(A Sookie Stackhouse Novel, #1)
Charlaine Harris

My Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Back of the Book:

Sookie Stackhouse is a small-time cocktail waitress in a 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, 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 with a bad reputation. He hangs with a seriously creepy crowd, all suspected of - big surprise - murder. And when one of Sookie's coworkers is killed, she fears she's next...

My Review:

I am sure all of you have figured out now that the vampire genre is one of my favorites and makes up a huge percentage of what I do read. So when I say that Dead Until Dark is one of my all time favorite vampire novels ever? You know I'm not messing around.

This book pretty much has everything that I want and expect from the genre: vampire politics and social structure, lots of smutty sex scenes and proper mythology of vampires not being able to come out during the day.

On top of all that it takes place in the backwoods of the South and the setting is fabulous. Charlaine Harris has this ability to just make the entire town of Bon Temps come alive and seem real in every aspect. Even the smallest characters have personalities to them and are definable. Plus I'm a little bit in love with her style of writing.

I don't want to go to much into the plot details because it is a mystery, a well-down one at that involving girl's who get "friendly" with vampires being strangled to death and raped (disturbingly in that order). The murderer isn't obvious but makes sense upon being revealed.

Finally, I used the original cover for the series here for this review and normally I am not a fan at all of TV/Movie cover changes but True Blood cover is also beautiful, imo:




If we're being completely honest here, Dead Until Dark was a book I started almost a year ago and it took an irrationally long time for me to finish it. I had originally picked it up to read on my flight out to San Diego for Comic-Con because I was a fan of True Blood and had learned that Charlaine Harris was going to be at the panel. I managed to get probably 80% of the book finished by the time I arrived in California however it got thrown into my bag and forgotten in the chaos that followed. By the time I got back home, it was lost in my bag of swag and not necessarily forgotten as much as it was misplaced. I finally ended up buying the box set of the first eight books during last year's Day After Thanksgiving Sale.

Seeing how it had been so long since I read the book, I started over (it's a bit to easy for me to confuse certain events on the show with the book because the show actually runs parallel to book in a number of cases) and it did take me a bit longer cause re-reading is never quite as quick for me as reading for the first time. But honestly? The only thing this proved to me was how much this book is worth a second read through.