Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris (Sookie Stackhouse #9)

I’m on holiday, I can read another of these.

I should be reading things more ambitious, things more serious, things more daring, things more poignant, things more more more….

Imagine thinking like that. That would have been me, just a few years ago.

Now, though, I know that Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels are probably the only thing that I – or anyone with a heart and a soul and body – should be reading.

This one opens with the estranged were-panther wife of Sookie Stackhouse (the telepathic waitress )’s brother being found dead and crucified in the car park of the bar she works in the day after all the werewolves and shapeshifters announce their existence and presence to the wider world, just as the vampires had in the recent past of Harris’ first Stackhouse novel, Dead Until Dark.

Chaos ensues, and a war taking place between various factions of the fairies, the fae, who live in an alternative reality but visit the human world, bubbles up into a big big problem for Sookie as she is (spoiler alert) part fairy and her closest fairy relative is a big fairy deal.

–///–

Chapter 3 of this novel opens with Sookie driving to visit Eric Northman (the hunky Viking vampire) at his nightclub, Fangtasia, and she misses: “The closer I got to the vampire bar, the more my pulse picked up”

And this is how I feel. This is how I imagine Charlaine Harris herself felt. This is how anyone would feel entering into this narrative world and letting it wash over, envelop, improve the self. Yes.

Yes yes yes.

–///–

Sookie is a charming and engaging narrator and protagonist… On reflecting on her and Eric’s previous hook-ups (which finally reoccur here after an absence in several books, booo), Sookie is asked if they’d shagged and she responds “Boy howdy, had we.”

How can anyone not loooove this kitsch?

There is joy innit.

And a nice big sex scene in the middle of the book that describes Eric cumming but again fails to confirm if vampire ejaculate is blood, as their tears are again confirmed to be. Sort it out, Charlaine!!! Scottie need an answer on this!!!

–///–

What else is in this one? Quite a lot of violence and torture, lots of blood-swapping, a strange reference to the flashbacks in Lost, and a very American comment from Sookie Stackhouse where she lists two of the wildest things for a person to be while chatting to a fairy:

“You’re a Christian,” he said, as if he’d discovered I was a hermaphrodite or a fruitarian.

The things you’ve seen, Sookie, yet the things you think are crazy are so unexceptional…

It’s a treat.

It’s a boon.

It’s a joy.

Read these books. Honestly, they’re great.

Join us. JOIN US… The synthetic blood is warm warm warm (because it’s microwaved for 15 seconds).