Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

This might be the best book I’ve ever read.

Well, no, obviously it’s not in any quantifiable or qualifiable way, like…. it’s not the best work of literature, the most moving work of art, most politically engaged or powerful, most humane, most poetic, most cathartic, most articulate, most artful, most informative, most intelligent, most artful, most, well, anything really… It’s not the “best book I’ve ever read“, sure, but it might well be the most I’ve enjoyed reading a book for as long as I can remember.

If you don’t already know what Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris is, then you are probably mighty confused by my effusive and gushing praise for a clearly cheaply produced trashy paperback clearly aimed at a mass rather than a niche literary readership.

What is going on?, you may ask. Has scott manley hadley finally had the lobotomy they probably need in order to stay alive? No, not yet.

The answer is simple:

It’s fucking True Blood, y’all.

Dead Until Dark is freakin’ True Blood.

Reading this is like being reunited with my best, sexiest friends.

Like being reunited with good, sexy, friends.

Like being reunited with friends.

Like being with friends.

Like being.

Like being alive

like slipping into a warm bath full of blood blood blood and your blood will soon be joining as you drift off into comfortable confident oblivion

Like the feeling of willful peace allegedly felt in the moments of drowning between struggling and death itself

Like the moment the last piece of a large turd slips out smoothly from your anus and finds its way into the water

Soothing, peaceful, warm and kind…

Is the writing evocative or is the TV show just an incredibly faithful adaptation, plotwise, filled with charming and charismatic performers who one is unable to not picture when reading the source????

Are Eric and Sookie as charming on the page as Skarsgård and Paquin render them on the screen?

Is the stilted Southern gentleman Bill Compton written by Charlaine Harris as compellingly as he is performed by Anna Paquin’s husband (I don’t remember his name – Stephen?)?

I don’t know.

Because I didn’t read Dead Until Dark until a couple of years after I watched the entirety of True Blood, until its increasingly chaotic world of fairies and werewolves and shape shifters and cults and witches and Lilith the first wife of Adam reached its pleasingly human and deeply emotive finale (it was just about Sookie and Bill, it was always about Sookie and Bill), and though I wouldn’t argue that in terms of writing, performance, direction, cinematography (televisionatography?) True Blood has the quality, power, artistic vision and likely longevity of – the two television shows I would say best advocate for the existence of long-form televisual drama – The Leftovers and Better Call Saul, in terms of charisma, of fun, of entertainment and excitement, it is (for me at least) hard to argue against the almost patronising way in which it rarely even gets a nod as even a potential “best TV series” kinda thing.

Probably because the main character is a woman.

Also because it’s very camp.

And also because it gets very silly.

But still – the last season of The Wire is non-naturalistic and no one ever mentions that! (maybe the way in which McNulty’s actions in that final season are treated by his peers is naturalistic/a realistic exaggeration of the tendency of police to protect their own, but the actions themselves are – anyway, who cares about that?)—

Did I enjoy Dead Until Dark more than anything else that’s happened in my – tbf very very shit atm 🤪 – life recently only because I thoroughly enjoyed True Blood?

Or is there merit in the text alone? Clearly someone at HBO thought so (or not, I don’t know how TV adaptations of novels work), and I definitely found a lot to enjoy here.

I realise there’s no detail here on what this book is about, but I’m presuming you know that if you’re here: it’s a tight first person perspective about a telepathic waitress who starts shagging a vampire a couple of years after vampires have been revealed to be real, after a synthetic blood has been invented which allows them to live and thrive without needing to kill humans. Someone has been killing “fang-bangers” (the slur used for humans who fuck vampires and get off on getting their blood sucked) and Sookie might be next… And Bill might be the culprit… And so might Jason, Sookie’s slutty older brother who isn’t a vampire but has shagged – and made amateur BDSM porn with – every single fang banger who has died…

Yes. Yes effing please.

It’s sexy, it’s sleazy, it’s silly, but it plays with its own genre and the expectations of its form and style (sneering references to Anne Rice and her romanticised novels making New Orleans a vampire pilgrimage site), and Sookie is far from being the idealised naif heroine – she is very much an active, rather than a passive, participant in everything that happens around her, and she also is (slight spoiler, but it’s not a big one as this is the first book of like 13 or so!) not reliant on a deus ex machina type intervention to survive her final confrontation with the serial killer at the end of the book and-

I don’t know how many people this will be relevant to, but if you also watched and loved True Blood but have never read this because you worried it would be so shit it would potentially ruin your fond memories of the TV show (like We Will Rock You the musical ruined the music of Queen), then rest assured that this is not the case.

Or am I just saying that to convince myself because I have a box set of ten of the Sookie Stackhouse novels (which I bought for £2 from a like yard sale in the Lake District two weeks ago), so I’m set to read and enjoy nine freaking more of these..?

I loved it.

I loved it more than I possibly thought I could and lots more than I probably should.

But I have nothing going on in my life. And I have nine more of these.

Charlaine Harris, thank you. What a fucking treat.