From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris (True Blood/Sookie Stackhouse Book #8)

Late in the evening (though still early in the night) of Saturday, hours after I last ate anything, I began to vomit.

I didn’t stop for much other than sleeping for around twelve hours … Snoozing on a sofa bed, next to a bucket that I filled up gradually over the course of the night.

Liquid liquid in the sink with the swirl of coriander (cilantro) leaves, undigested bread and pieces of halloumi that matched in the midnight sink the early evening mezze I had thought at the time I was enjoying…

Later, in the bucket, in the dark, retching up liquid that felt like it was coming from the depth of the pits of my torso, accompanied by solid that I didn’t see, but it felt grainy, sand like, dense, dusty, like small particles, like dirt, like something made of ground down stones…

This all night, then Sunday all day snoozing and awaking, snoozing and awaking … in the glimmers of daylight and consciousness and freedom, I was able to return to a place of safety , a place of pleasure, a place of death and joy and violence and vampires…… Yes, to the world of telepathic part-fairy waitress Sookie Stackhouse, in the eighth of her adventures.

They’re all good. They’re possibly all great, these books.

Almost definitely all great.

They’re almost certainly all great.

But what they also are is accessible.

Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries are novels you can read half a chapter of, go to sleep for fifteen minutes, read half a chapter of while slowly drinking a peppermint tea, read three chapters of, sleep again, eat some toast, then read some more.

Not because it’s shit and isn’t worthy of more attention, not at all. But because Charlaine Harris’ perfect prose – here, as with the rest of this series, from the perspective of Sookie Stackhouse herself – is clear and direct and, most importantly, incredibly characterful.

All of the characters are characterful. No one here is just a trope, or just a narrative device, or just the weird supernatural thing about them…

The weretiger (like a werewolf but transforming into a tiger not a wolf, obviously) boyfriend isn’t just able to turn into a tiger, the vampires aren’t just hungry for blood, power and sex, the werewolves have more going on than just their regular orgies, the fairies aren’t solely motivated by being like good little helper godparents to wandering lost humans…

The boozers in the Bon Temps bar are people, the characters who enter in one scene to be killed or scared off are quickly and clearly sketched… There isn’t ambiguity around who is a person and who is a plot point…

Harris doesn’t fuck about: every minor villain has a motive, or a creed or at least a loyalty to someone or something other than its blunt basic act in its scene…

Harris is the great American novelist. These are the great American novels. There is more reflexivity about class and money and culture and religion and prejudice and violence than can be found in most far more critically noted books.

Using the naïve yet ever more connected, ever more wise, Sookie as a narrator, Harris is able to get away with moments that might jar slightly in the mouth or the mind of a character meant to be less conflicted, or less able to commit to existing and developing as a human.

Yes, these are fun, pacy thrillers about inter werewolf clan rivalries and vampire royalty taking over neighbouring vampire kingdoms…

But it’s also a human story about a young woman building community, growing into a complex and mature adult and learning how and where this sets her apart from others who live in her small town.

It’s marvellous stuff. It bears academic scrutiny and revisiting, it bears long conversation and repeated thought, it bears in depth love and passion.

These are stories about fairies and vampires and shapeshifters and witches, but they’re also stories about small town lawyers and bartenders and waitresses and cops and librarians and caterers and teachers and mechanics and labourers and small business owners…

These are novels that may have literal magic in them, but they also have a very real and a very developed humanity, a literary magic, in them, too…

Maybe, yes, of course, maybe they’re not the “best” books ever written, but they may well be the best books ever written – that I’ve read – that aren’t broadly considered to be serious and significant works of art.

I’m going to look to explore these in more detail in some other kind of project, I think, once I’ve read through the last few over the next few months.

They’re an absolute fucking treat, the Southern Vampire Mysteries, and if you’re not reading them, you’re not really reading at all…

–///–

Name a better living American novelist. Go on. Sure, OK. Now name one whose books can both be enjoyed while you’re sick and while you’re well, whose books reward concentration but don’t demand it? Isn’t this exactly what every writer should be aiming for?

Yes, yes it is.

I’ll be back with Sookie soon. I’ve got a holiday booked in April, so the next novel is getting preemptively thrown in my suitcase today so I don’t forget to travel with my best friends (Sookie and Eric and Pam and Sam and all the rest of the gang).

Do yourself a favour – if you don’t hate yourself – and go read a Charlaine Harris.

If you do hate yourself, maybe try one anyway… It might just realign you with the possibility of joy…