All Together Dead by Charlaine Harris (True Blood/Sookie Stackhouse Book #7 lol)

cw: mental illness, suicide ideation, personality disorders, anhedonia, etc etc etc

Something I’m finding especially difficult at the moment – and for the past couple of years or so – is that I genuinely don’t know [of] anyone else who hates their life as much as I do.

I’ve said all this before (here I think but maybe not?), but it used to be that soon after leaving the house, one would find other people with contempt for those around them, with no interest in the place or the manner of their own life, no interest or pride in the way they spend their time, with just occasional flecks of hedonism or creativity or cultural consumption to partially balance out an otherwise unwieldy world…

Now, though no one seems to be like that. No one else seems to regret absolutely everything about themselves.

With mass consumption of antidepressants, with simplistic, idealistic and ignorant pushes towards “positive thinking” and vacuous “mindfulness”, “manifesting”, and all the other cognitive behavioural therapy adjacent affirmation type exercises that are normal now, people have either tricked themselves into feeling content within a destabilising, unpleasant, radicalising society, or everyone’s just as fucking emotionally repressed as I am sexually repressed and they’re all fucking scared to say that they don’t like the world as it is…

I read an article last week about borderline personality disorder, which is the mental illness I’ve most recently been diagnosed with. 10% of people diagnosed with BPD go on to kill themselves and when I read that I genuinely thought I wish I’d already killed myself. Lol. Lucky bastards, I thought, haha

😂😂😂

I’m stuck in a holding pattern holding a present that is soooo unsustainable, yetttttt, the potential futures from here aren’t terrible (which is why I’m holding, ¿yeah?, before you ask), but I’ve been in positions before where there were good potential futures and where there have been good presents,too, yeah, yet here I am in a future to a good present that’s now a good past yet the good present turned into a future that’s now a bad present. Bad bad bad bad bad bad bad.

Bad.

Bad.

There’s basically nothing about my life (some things excepted, love ya darlin’!) I wouldn’t completely change given the opportunity, but I know that there is one thing I would maintain even in a potential good future (I tell myself it could happen!), a good future with meaning, integrity, consistency, joy, self-confidence, pleasure, and relaxation, and that would be the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris.

This is the seventh one of these that I’ve read, so this isn’t really a moment to be trying to persuade anyone to begin the series, as I’m already a veeeeery long way in, and I would hate to accidentally make someone feel uncertain about picking these up by revealing any too big plot points, especially by this point, where the books diverge tremendously from the TV show based on them, True Blood.

The entirety of this novel is set at a major vampire conference which Sookie, the telepathic waitress, attends as the living lie detector of the vampire Queen of Louisiana.

Sookie’s got a new boyfriend here who is a weretiger – yes, that is like a werewolf, but he turns into a tiger, not a wolf – and her previous vampire boyfriends, Eric and Bill, remain around (with all passion for Bill loooong faded, but an ever growing interest in hooking up with hunky Eric Northman the Viking vampire (played so flawlessly by prestige TV’s Alexander Skarsgard in the adaptation).

The anti-vampire far right Christians are back, the other telepathic person who Sookie has met is back, so is Russell Edgington – much more fun and friendly in the books than he is in True Blood – and in All Together Dead, Harris explores more vampire intrigue and more casual violence that Suki responds to in a complex and humanely rendered manner, with her increasing desensitization becoming a plot point and a point of contention between her and the other people who aren’t vampires who she spends time with…

Yes, I’m very depressed, but in this set of not-really-trashy trashy paperbacks, there is some joy to be found, there are some moments of pleasure to be had…

Charlaine Harris writes and sketches plots and characters who echo throughout her works with a complex lived reality, even around all of the mythical and fantasy tropes that she uses and/or subverts.

These books are engaging, entertaining, playful, and I like them.

Yes, one could argue that there isn’t much poetry to be found in Harris’s prose, but I would argue that there is enough impactful characterisation and clear imaginative description to absolutely outweigh any literature snob’s requirement for consistently harmonic sentence structure…

You don’t need to be a fucking intellectual to read, understand, or enjoy these books, but to dismiss them as trashy sexy pulp, would be to do them a great disservice…

Charlaine Harris writes people (I’m including people who are also mythical creatures here) who are more complex and rounded than many highly acclaimed novelists and poets ever have, and she does so in a series of texts that are accessible, engaging, fun, and deeply, deeply fulfilling.

I hate my life,but I love these books!

Do the Sookie Stackhouse novels make life worth living? Not mine, but I have explicitly committed to not killing myself in the short to medium to short-long term, and as I am great at being reliable, especially/exclusively when it aligns with not putting my best interests at heart, (my best interests are being dead, maybe???), so (I suppose) finding joy where it can be found is something I should try to do more.

Which means that, yes, soon, once again… I will be returning to the world of Sookie Stackhouse. Halfway through these books but loving every page.

An excellent, excellent novel.

Grow up and find a copy.