The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories by Charlaine Harris (Sookie Stackhouse #14)

This is the 14th book in Charlaine Harris’s usually incomparable Sookie Stackhouse series. Though not part of the series proper – which ended with the 13th novel – this is a collated edition of 10 stories (including a 100-page novella), all of which were previously published in anthologies and magazines during the original run of the novels.

That’s right…

Ten additional slices of Bon Temps action…

Ten additional chances to hang out with my best buddies at Merlotte’s bar…

Ten more opportunities to feel the power of the vampire, the werewolf and the magic and beauty of the fae…

But, alas, there’s a reason why none of these stories were included as chapters or appendices in the novels, and were instead published in anthologies and magazines basically no one bar Charlaine Harris has heard of… Many of these are sketches and ideas, far from fully formed, and arguably add nothing to the Sookie Stackhouse oeuvre, potentially even diminishing the literary prowess of Harris’s reputation, as the texts here break several key rules and ideas of her own fictional world…

Yes. I hate to offer bad news on this blog (especially after the previous bleak and serious post (not bleak and serious about me btw, I’m doing fine, but the world isn’t (I don’t think they’re connected))), but I am about to say something I never thought I would: this book by Charlaine Harris is not an excellent book.

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

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The earlier stories in this collection are far more effective and enjoyable than the later ones, because – even though these were all published in obscure places – Harris was writing them as if – and with the 100% expectation that – anybody and everybody who was reading and enjoying the Sookie Stackhouse novels would find these stories and devour them.

For this reason, many of these stories include details that are intrinsic to narrative threads in the novel series, and one story in particular introduces multiple key characters who arrive as if familiar in one of the novels…

There are interactions in these stories that inform later plots, and moments that expand and explain series-length character development. They’re written as if part of the novels, even though they’re not. And these stories, yes, are enjoyable, and do show Harris working well with the characters and the world she has created…

However, about halfway through The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories, Harris suddenly realises that far fewer people are reading these stories than are reading her novels, and definitively understands that certainly not everyone is.

And then, rather than continue putting the effort in but with a note to avoid hefty and important plot points and character development, Harris instead essentially withdraws care.

Thus, several of these pieces end up being pale shadows of the novels themselves, with the 100 page novella being a strange midpoint between these two extremes – there is important character development in here, but lots of that is then duplicated in the novel that followed it chronologically, but it also has significantly higher stakes (approaching all-out war between the supernatural and the non-supernatural residents of the world), as well as a level of technology that is not in keeping with the timeline of the novels proper, which feel like details Charlaine Harris is elsewhere very good at maintaining.

The action of the Sookie Stackhouse novels takes place no more than a year or two either side of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans, and the technology, websites, smartphone usage etc matches that, until suddenly in this novella, there are iPhones and social media galore…

It’s disappointing to see a writer who is usually in total control of her characters and settings use those same names and those same places but with far less care…

There are crossovers here with some of Harris’s other series of novels, and these ones quite explicitly avoid mention of vampires, because presumably there aren’t vampires in those series of novels…

There’s also one that sees Sookie Stackhouse face-off against a fucking active shooter situation in an elementary school, which feels like far more mundane yet far more terrifying than ordinarily exists in these books (guns and tiny children, no thank you!)… Sookie, a fellow telepath (a child) and a substitute teacher (who is a witch) use their supernatural abilities to save the day, with the only fatality being the shooter (shot by police) and the only other person being shot (not fatally) is the school principal… It’s all far less playful (i.e. far less vampiric) than one expects in the Stackhouseverse…

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Is there fun to be had here?

Yes, I suppose there is… but, overall, this doesn’t really add anything to Harris’s created world, and had these stories been read as palette cleansers, amuse-bouches, in between Sookie Stackhouse novels during their publication run – as Harris intended for them to be – their faults would be far more justifiable, and thus the stories far more enjoyable.

Reading all ten of them here together, though, just emphasises the weaknesses of the stories and could even cause a potentially cynical reader to reflect back on the novels proper and ask… “Maybe they were all like this..?”

But not me.

Because they weren’t all like this.

Those novels are perfect and I love them.

They’re wonderful and I refuse to allow the carelessnesses and the weaknesses of Harris’s short fiction to cloud memories of that beautiful beautiful beautiful perfect perfect perfect series of novels.

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Oh, and there is also a 15th book in the series, which explores and describes the lives of the characters after the novels, which I will (obviously) read at some point, but I have to say that the experience of reading The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories caused me to move it a liiiiittle bit further down my pile of books than it had been at the start of the week.

Boo hoo.

Heartbreaking.