Dead In The Family by Charlaine Harris (Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood #10

On page 25 of Charlaine Harris’s 10th masterpiece in the 13-novel series known alternately as The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries, The Southern Vampire Mysteries or – on most editions designed or republished since 2008 – True Blood, one of the most magical, powerful, and perfect moments of metatextual joy I’ve ever encountered takes place.

It is a set of sentences that elevate this playful, yet intricately plotted, totally consistent, richly characterful and arguably flawless series of trash-adjacent vampire sex novels into something deeper, more artful and more creatively important than they even were before. (And, for context, before this moment I have argued that these novels are essentially the closest that America has even gotten to Proust, though maybe the literary nerds would find a comparison to the magic realist type big literary texts of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez type figure easier to swallow…)

This moment, on p.25 of a novel that explores the repercussions of torture and forced imprisonment, that explores legacies of abuse, colonialism, revolution, passing of entire societies and entire ways of life, that touches on political definitions and exploitations of difference, that looks at repressive religion, that explores pain and regret and grief and fear, and also includes sexy werewolves, sexy vampires, sexy fairies and sexy people who can turn into animals other than wolves… this moment cements this series as literature, emphasises my claims to its artfulness and literary cultural import, and moreover evokes a playful, yet complex, shared reality between this very fictionalised world and the sadly magic-free world in which we are doomed to exist…

Harris writes the following:

“There,” said Sam. I had to strain to hear him. Someone had put Jace Everett’s “Bad Things” on, and just about everyone in the bar was singing along. “You’ve smiled three times tonight.”

If, like it did me, that initially means nothing to you, then hold on…

Charlaine Harris (through the mouthpiece of her first person narrator, Sookie Stackhouse) has never recommended a song before.

In Sookie’s Louisiana, the kinda music that would be played in the kinda bar that Sookie and her buddies would be in is – I probably shouldn’t admit this unprompted – the kinda music I would probably like.

As much as I know it has shifted from being a weird outsider interest to now something Beyoncé and fans of Beyoncé openly listen to, I have been regularly listening to morally reprehensible contemporary country music since the Summer of 2019, when I accidentally visited Calgary, Alberta, during the week of the Calgary Stampede, which is an annual rodeo that takes place just down from the Eastern foothills of the Canadian Rockies. I did not plan my trip to coincide with the rodeo, but once I was in town and aware of the cowboys, I had to go and see.

I wasn’t disappointed. I have been having a big and rich time ever since.

I have a playlist you’re welcome to check out via this link which contains my favourite (to date!) country (and countryish) tracks, named after the response given by a “serious” country music DJ when my lover called their “serious” country music station a year or two later to request one of our shared favourite songs. Ok

The unserious country song we requested is the kinda song – as are many of the songs on that playlist – that I can imagine being played somewhere like Merlotte’s (Sookie’s (or Charlaine’s?) fictional bar); music about hating cheating spouses, about being cheating spouses, about being alcoholic farmers, about thinking that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with socially conservative attitudes towards romantic relationships (and guns)…

Yes, though I do understand and acknowledge that popular mainstream contemporary country is a morally reprehensible artform that purports and evokes a dangerously simplified world, in denial of the realities of many interlinked and intersectional structural ininquities and inequalities, yes, but that doesn’t stop me from listening to it sometimes. Yes, it is music for a small town dive bar, yes.

So, when Harris writes of a song that the clientele of Merlotte’s enjoy to the point that “just about everyone” in there sings along to, I just knew this was a song I had to hear.

As quick as I could, I made my way to an internet-enabled device and loaded up the old school music streaming service “Spotify”, and punched in the code for for ‘Bad Things’ by Jace Everett.

The thrum of electric guitar began in my ears and a smile began to spread on my permanently depressed face. I know this song, I thought in my head.

“Charlaine,” I said aloud in a tone of absolute awe, genuine respect and with my previous understanding of the possibilities and limits of fiction blown apart: “you’ve fucking done it again…”

Nothing is better, nothing is more perfect, no moment is more satisfying than this description of a bar full of Sookie Stackhouse and her friends and colleagues singing this song, because this song… This fucking song…

This song is the fucking theme tune… to HBO’s True Blood

Flawless mastery.

Harris deserves the Nobel prize.

–///–

Nb: I, sadly, realised when reading this book that I may not get out of this series the one thing it has so far been holding back… I want, but may never get, a definitive answer to the question : do the vampires ejaculate blood?

There is the perfect moment for this revelation, this detail, here, as Harris writes a semi-detailed sex scene that follows an emotional crisis for the hunky Viking vampire, Eric Northman.

Eric cries, Eric weeps, and – like Le Chiffre – he weeps blood. Sookie comforts the crying vampire and his blood-speckled face, and a hug leads to a kiss and so on and then Eric is coming in her mouth, but Harris offers us no notes on the iron-content of Eric’s ejaculate… Is it ordinary semen? It is clear that something issues from his cock into Sookie’s mouth, but the substance itself isn’t described…

The jury is out. I have three more Sookie novels and two collections of stories, so maybe the answer remains hidden in one of those, but I’m losing hope, Charlaine… I’m losing hope I will ever know. And I want to know soooo baaaaad.