Deadlocked by Charlaine Harris (Sookie Stackhouse #12)

I’m nearly at the end.

Now that I’ve read Deadlocked I have only one more novel left from the pen of Charlaine Harris about my best friends in the world, Sookie Stackhouse and the gang…

I mean, there’s also a short story collection, an epilogue of sorts like the end of an American teen movie (a book which looks to contain around a thousand words of text lol, cheeky Charlaine!) and a spin off book containing two novellas, but let’s not pretend that these are going to meaningfully stave off the imminent ending…

I’ve read a Sookie Stackhouse (the novels the Skarsgaard-Paquin TV series True Blood is based on) book roughly every six weeks or so since I bought a boxset of ten of them from a Lake District honesty box church fundraising shack in July 2023. In that time, sliding into one of these novels on the regular has become a very real, a very bloody, preferred pleasure.

During that time I have conceived a baby, gained a baby (the same one), moved across (alas not away from) the city, travelled the furthest east I’ve ever been (I went to India for a minibreak) and began a gently regular performance practice. And through all of that, Sookie, Eric, Bill, Alcide, Pam, Sam and all the rest of the gang (my friends) have been there for me, buried in the pages of Charlaine Harris’ perfectly made novels.

The one thing I don’t like about these books is that they’re emphasising – to me (possibly the only person I’ve ever met who did so), a person who watched and enjoyed all of it – how much of a failure True Blood was.

I’d always presumed that the later, less satisfying, seasons were because they’d – a la Game of Thrones (remember that???) – run out of source material and weree just fucking winging it. But they weren’t! Charlaine Harris wrote 13 (I don’t expect the last one’s going to be a dud!) borderline flawless examples of characterful, evocative genre fiction, and those fools at HBO decided to chuck waaaay more of it down the toilet than any sensible adaptation should have and act as if Harris basically only wrote two (maybe three?) books.

I found the ending of True Blood very moving and very sad, but the show’s decision to centre the relationship between Sookie and Bill flattened both of those characters compared to the source.

In the novels, Harris makes a romantic reconciliation between the two of them an impossibility due to Bill’s unforgivable actions, yet his remorse, regret and his choice to not deny culpability (despite clear manipulation that led him to his rock bottom) makes for a far more interesting dynamic. They have become friends again, but they cannot be partners. In fact, it is friendship that really exists in these later novels as a central theme, especially as Eric and Sookie’s relationship cools as he is courted by a powerful vampire Queen who wants him for a consort…

Sookie’s friend Tara gives birth to twins… Her dumb handsome friend JB du Rone (cruelly not even in True Blood, at least not memorably) joins Sookie’s fairy cousins as a stripper… There’s more chaos in the local werewolf pack… Sam the shapeshifting bar owner (which Sookie is now an investor in) has a werewolf girlfriend and things don’t go well… Sookie has a powerful item of fairy magic that humans and others are all desperately trying to get hold of… There are murders and mysteries and blood and sex (not that much sex this time and, no, it doesn’t clarify if vampires ejaculate blood)… There’s trouble in the land of the fairies… Vampire governance power struggles abound… Elves are hunting deer in the Bon Temps woods… Jason Stackhouse is settling down… Pam and Sookie are friends… The bar Sookie sunk her savings into seems to be doing ok… And then, in the final pages, there’s an unexpected narrative shift that takes many options off the table for the final novel in the series and solidifies and emphasises what is truly important to your friend and mine, Sookie Stackhouse.

It’s entertaining, it’s engaging, it’s characterful and it’s fun. As I’ve said before, the violence has consequences, which marks it out from lots of other similar texts: Sookie is scarred not only by the violence she has been the victim of, but also psychologically due to the violence she has perpetrated. In this one, she throws a pan of boiling water over a man who is then immediately killed by a demon and the two of them sit and chat before disposing of the body. This is not done without an understanding that this is a sign of someone who has, slowly, gently, lost some of her sense of the importance (or meaningfulness) of life and death.

Sookie is a complex character, an interesting person, with motives and regrets and desires that constantly intersect and cause her problems. There is a coherence and a consistency to Harris’ writing that makes it joyful to read, without it ever becoming trite or unserious. It’s silly sometimes, yes, but that’s (to me!) a playfulness that doesn’t detract at all from the richness of Harris’ creation.

As per the eleven others I’ve read, highly recommended. Get a life: get a Sookie Stackhouse.