Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris (Sookie Stackhouse #13 (of 13))

Endings are tough. There’s a reason many choose to avoid them.

There are people who would rather wait decades for death than deal with the stress of breaking up with someone they can’t stand… there are people who gamble their entire lives away on the possibility of good health in their early seventies in order to avoid the friction of changing their employment or financial status before retirement… and there are – of course – people so scared of emotion and catharses that they distract or numb themselves rather than allow the full emotional weight of life (or even Art) to ever overwhelm them.

Death is an ending, death is the ending (of life), but death isn’t the ending of most interpersonal relationships that we have.

We lose contact, we break up, we quit the job, we leave the area, we go home, we extricate ourselves… there are few things (other than literal life itself) that actually end at death.

Everyone will be pleased to know that the Sookie Stackhouse novels don’t end with the death of the telepathic waitress (now small business co-owner) protagonist, and in no way does it feel like Harris pulled a punch by leaving her alive. Not everything has to end with death.

But everything has to end.

–///–

A potent series of sexy-adjacent (or lightly sexy?) adventure literature (yes it is literature) about interpersonal relationships (it’s basically a soap with vampires, werewolves, fairies etc in) has the potential to run and run and run and never draw to a close.

Harris (still alive, still writing, still publishing – even if she isn’t updating her own website any more) could have continued the Sookie Stackhouse novels indefinitely.

But she chose to end them.

She chose to end them at Book #13.

Like the Pret A Manger coffee subscription, though, I won’t be sad that it’s over, I’ll rejoice that it happened.

Something doesn’t need to be forever to be good.

–///–

Every long running film, television or fiction series tends to be judged far harsher (and remembered more strongly) on the way that it ends rather than on the way that it continued. (See the memory-holing (that means forgettingness) of once-loved Game of Thrones.)

People can be tempted to do that in real life, too: the ending of a relationship negates all the joy and excitement that it ever contained… a bad or an unexpected death overshadows the previous patterns of a life…. We often look at conclusions as if they matter the most.

As if it is not what something is as it exists but how something signs off that is what the majority recall.

It is a popular mantra that “you only get one first impression”, and this is something many people really do take to heart (especially professionally). But what seems far more significant, actually, (in terms of longevity and foreverness) is the last impression.

I will be making some last impressions of my own over the next couple of weeks as I am moving on from the job I’ve had for the last couple of years to spend the arse end of my lover’s maternity leave (the mother of my child, BB Whamathan) in Canada. I’ll be back in the UK and seeking satisfaction (i.e. not full time work) come the New Year and I am very excited about doing so. Yes, fewer and worse holidays, but (hopefully) a quotidian life that cries out far less than it currently does (which is much less than it used to) for balancing-out the misery of daylight (beginning and maintaining a minor performance practice seems to have been the mental health balm I’ve needed, so ensuring I maintain that is a top five priority (position debatable, but highest is #3 (after BB Whamathan & Cubby))).

What, though, will I do with myself as I fill my baby’s waking weekday hours with care and engagement and some of (most of?) my weekends and evenings with assorted kinds of casual work?

What will I do, now I can no longer spend my free(r) hours reading the Sookie Stackhouse novels (because I don’t re-read, I can’t re-read, I won’t re-read (sometimes all of those statements are lies))?

Probably, I will spend a lot of time daydreaming about my buddies back in Bon Temps. Possibly, though, the memories will fade away like a sweet dream fades in the morning… Mingling between memory and fantasy, lapsing from clarity into mystery and and and and and…

–///–

Does Charlaine Harris land the plane??? OF COURSE Charlaine Harris lands the plane. Is it a smooth landing (ending)? Yes, I suppose so.

Though Harris does do something utterly unexpected, unprecedented and – I’d argue – literally dangerous: she presents multiple passages within this novel – including the prologue – WHERE SOOKIE STACKHOUSE IS NOT THE NARRATOR.

If – like me, and most other people who grew up English and had/have a penis and/or have read books loved by people who had/have penises they love[d] having – you’ve read From Russia With Love, then Harris’ sudden pitch into the hearts and minds of antagonists isn’t an unprecedented move, however doing it for the first time in book 13 of 13¹ is audacious.

Is this forgivable, this late-in-the-day structural pivot?

Initially it arrives and is – I exaggerate for effect but not by much – mind-blowing.

Can she even do this? I asked.

Is this permissible? I wondered.

Charlaine, what are you doing to meeeeee? I screamed into the abyss that is the middle of the English night. (I say the middle of the English night, I actually read the book in a single day while travelling – my first international trip with my child, BB Whamathan – from London to an unspecified canal-filled North Italian city built in a lagoon and it was a melancholic companion indeed.²)

–///–

It’s over. It’s all all all over.

But it’s not quite the bonanza of death and destruction that an ending to a series of novels about vampires could have been.

There’s shagging (yes, Sookie once again beds down with a warm blooded man (“My bikini bra was history, and he was so happy with my breasts”)), there’s a break-up (noooo Eriiiiiiiic), there’s cruelty and killing and remorse, there are old characters back for revenge, old friends back for solidarity and mysterious other characters who are never quite explained, this last one leading to my favourite moment in the book / all literature when the below happens

“She’s in Bon Temps. […] Sookie Stackhouse.” / The devil nodded slowly. “I’ve heard the name.”

–///–

Sookie is framed for murder. There are magic spells. There are consequences. There is loss. There is hope. There is a possible future. There is lots of fun.

Charlaine Harris may not have been on the shortlist for last week’s Nobel Prize and might not have awards under her belt, but in this set of 13 novels (plus two non-novels I’m yet to read), she creates a human, complex and expansive cast of characters existing, sure, in a non-naturalistic world, but she executes it pat.

Harris makes a reader care, deeply, about the love lives of the undead, about fictional political factions, about demons and fairies and werepanthers and telepaths.

It isn’t just that these are well plotted that makes them work, which would be the ordinary accusation levelled at a genre text.

These books are expertly put together, complex, fleshed out examples of excellent narrative fiction.

Yes, things that aren’t real and couldn’t be real exist here, but the reactions and the responses and the emotions expressed and evoked are fucking human and complex and real.

A real fucking treat. A real treat.

And I’ll probably spend a while annoyed with myself for how quickly I read through the whole lot…

–///–

What else is like this and genuinely this good? Please let me know in the comments if you can think of anything and you have enough critical facilities to be aware of the difference between good and fun. Please!

Please!

There may not be more Sookie Stackhouse to read (those two non-novel books aside which, let’s be realistic, I’ll be hoovering up through my bookstrils (reading with my eyes) very soon), but my friends in Bon Temps are with me now, forever and ever. Onwards and onwards and onwards.

Thank you, Charlaine, for all the memories. Thank you for all the friends. Thank you for the good times.

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

1. there are also two others but they’re not novels so don’t count (only novels count, this is England (as I had to remind my friend/mentor/icon/acquaintance/colleague/teacher/hero Fernando Sdrigotti on the recent announcement of his new book, which unfortunately is a collection of short stories rather than a novel or a piece of creative non-fiction.) ↩︎
2. I was saying to my lover while we were there that Venice itself is kinda vampiric… everything you see either seems to have remained exactly the same for an eerily long amount of time, or is a blunt attempt at [economic] extraction. ↩︎