Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris (True Blood/Sookie Stackhouse Book #6)

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic – which is absolutely not my intention – there is a very strong case to be made that Charlaine Harris is a generational talent who (had circumstances been different) could have written some of the dryest but important novels of the past thirty years. Thank god she didn’t try to be the “next” William Faulkner and instead became what she is:

America’s greatest living exponent of popular literature at its zenith.

Charlaine Harris is a storyteller of such innate yet potent power that had her near-flawless novels – which burn with intense and rapid characterisation, crisp and clear description, constant inventive imagination and Proustian structural complexity – featured “coastal elites” with no supernatural abilities (and had she wanted to), Harris would be ranked alongside – and possibly considered the best of – those writers who pump out those boring, giant, “great American novel” type books that people with New Yorker tote bags and centrist politics buy hardback copies of…

Charlaine Harris’ novels are unpretentious, unrefined, unfiltered, unputdownable and unforgettable.

They are fucking brilliant. At least the six I’ve read are!

These novels are all from the same series, variously referred to as the Southern Vampire Mysteries, the Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries, the books that True Blood is based on, whatever, and they aren’t just throwaway feathersoftcore (softer than softcore) fantasy romance/erotica, nor are they flimsy pulp trash; Harris takes the themes and the images and the aesthetics of pulp crime, of romance, of fantasy, of whatever, and rather than each element detracting from any other aspect of these engrossing, humane, articulate, novels, they each combine to elevate the other aspects, they each escalate the catharses and the power of these texts…

Charlaine Harris is a “great American writer” writing like she’s picked it up as she went along, like an autodidact. And maybe this isn’t true, maybe Harris is an Ivy League and Iowa Writers Workshop graduate who knows exactly what she’s doing (I’m not going to look up her education, I’m no snob (with my education I couldn’t afford to be lololol)), but that would take nothing away…

These novels feel unpretentious, they feel effortless (as in easy, eager, gentle, rather than constructed and constricted by form and planning), with the direction of the narrative feeling as if it was as unknown during the novel’s composition as the plot was to telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse as she navigates her supernatural Louisiana and lives through it…

These novels feel like someone sitting in front of a typewriter and bleeding. Maybe this is a highly constructed effect. Maybe these are all written in under a week. Who cares? The results are phenomenal.

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Is Charlaine Harris the non-naturalistic American Marcel Proust? Is she better than that?

Is this closer to the experience of reading Proust in the original French than reading Proust in translation is?

A central, reflective narrator exploring their intellectual, romantic, sexual and empathetic development as they understand more of the world around them and they increasingly become involved with important and powerful people?

It’s Proust with vampires.

It’s serious, important, literature, but also fun, frothy, silly, playful and racy.

This one?

Sookie meets the Vampire Queen of Louisiana, meets some demons, discovers she has fairy blood (the last remaining plot revelation that watching all of True Blood had kept me waiting for), she wanks off a were tiger (like a werewolf but a tiger not a wolf) who fingers her to orgasm, makes friends with a witch who has a pet cat who used to be her boyfriend that she was practicing spells on… It’s all classic Sookie Stackhouse stuff. And it’s all fucking great.

Highly recommended. Even at this time of year. 🙏🙏🙏

Go read some Charlaine Harris!!!