Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris (Sookie Stackhouse / True Blood #11)

What I love about these books as they go on is their soapishness.

This one features – alongside all of the fun crap about vampire governments, about inter-fairy warfare (no longer happening in the human world but still as a background), about power tussles in the local werewolf packs – baby showers and break-ups, chats about historic (albeit interspecies) adultery and – a new one – a repeated thread about the sad tragedy of someone dying of cancer who can’t be saved from death by being turned into a vampire (because of inter-vampire power plays, sure, but it’s played with emotion)…

Sookie, in this novel, breaks her blood bond with Eric Northman, assists in killing the most senior vampire in the region, helps to arrange a one-off concert given by the shy vampire known as Bubba (who is the cat blood-crazy vampire version of Elvis Presley) and discovers how and why she (and her cousin’s child) has the power of telepathy.

There are elves and fairies, witches and werewolves, people who can turn into dogs at will, people who had previously been turned into cats against their will (then turned back), there are people who work in retail, there are demons, there are waitresses and

A fairy strip club (as in a strip club run by fairies), an Elvis-themed vampire bar (though Elvis isn’t involved in that venture and it is in order to lure the bad vampire running that into a trap that the Elvis concert is arranged later in the novel…

There’s a hunky werewolf naked in Sookie’s bed (arranged as a “favour” by her stripper fairy cousin and her busybody trust fund witch friend)… There’s staking and bleeding and violence and death…

And there’s also lots and lots and lots about Sookie feeling guilt and shame and remorse about all the violence and bloodshed and killing that now surrounds her. (It is also stated that ONLY TWO YEARS have passed since she first Bill waaaay back in Harris’ first novel in this series (published well over a decade before this one).

This is, then, Charlaine Harris’ Goldfinger. A person surrounded by who has normalised death and violence sits in and with their reality, questioning its morality and find themselves and their choices wanting, yet not really seeing any way out, any way out, any way out at all.

Is it the most exciting in the series? No. Is it the sexiest in the series? No. Does it finally answer the question “do vampires ejaculate blood?”? No, though it does explicitly reiterate that they CRY blood, which is maybe the clearest indication we’re going to get.

It’s another engaging, entertaining and emotive novel from Harris. Buuuut the stakes do feel lower here than elsewhere… In the final bit fight scene, for example, I never felt like Pam, Sookie, Bubba, Bill or Eric were ever really in danger, and none of the people who died was anyone Sookie, Charmaine Harris or me, the reader, cared about.

Now that the fairy wars are over, is there any escalation left in the series? With only two novels (and a short story collection and a book offering brief epilogues for all the surviving characters) left in the series, I’m not certain what’s going to happen.

It’s very much diverged from True Blood by this point, and unless the penultimate book is about a day-walking fairy vampire (which doesn’t feel likely) and the one after that is about Bill being transformed into the embodiment of Biblical Lilith, the first vampire (which also feels unlikely) I am a little worried the excitement in the series has peaked…

But the characters, I love them, their love lives I care about, how and who and where they love matters, yeah, matters to me…

I love the Sookie Stackhouse books, and honestly I don’t know if I don’t secretly actually like them more when “nothing” happens… Whatever, they’re great.

I love Charlaine Harris. And I’m sad I’m nearly done with this beautiful, almost perfect, series or beautiful books. America’s Proust (name a better contender in the comments if you can) writing America’s Goldfinger.

Perfect.

Me and my fluffiest cutefriend reading Sookie on a train: