After Dead by Charlaine Harris (Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood #15 (of 13))

One evening last week, I knew I would be spending over an hour (in the end it was about one hour twenty) travelling through the city by night bus.

Aware that misery and discomfort were sure to occur, I made sure to pack myself some discomfort-squashing books.

I had four books with me for the ride, not because I expected to read all four of them, but because I wanted to make sure I had options.

I had the dregs of a mediocre – but beautifully presented – book supposedly about ecclesiastical architecture but actually about a hobbyist poindexter doing the worst flaneuring of all time; I had a late Arthur Miller play about musicians in a concentration camp, I had an Ann Leckie I haven’t read and I had this, the book that I did read in its entirety as I flew from Kew Bridge to Trafalgar Square then onto a second night bus south that – very conveniently – dropped me at the bus stop literally over the road from my building*¹.

That book was, of course, After Dead, the 15th book in Charlaine Harris’ 13 novel series (those numbers are correct) about Sookie Stackhouse, the telepathic Louisianan (spoiler alert) part-fae bar owner and friend to the supernatural community.

After Dead is, yes, a cynical cash grab.

After Dead takes well under an hour to read and is filled with blank (or badly graphic designed) title pages. Every page of text has more blank space around it than the average book of poetry.

But

And but but but

What this is, is Charlaine Harris’ attempt at wrapping up the lives of pretty much all of the characters mentioned (and still alive/undead) by the novel series’ end.

Some of them may have only appeared in some of the short stories, and many of them I barely remember from the blissful couple of years I spent pounding through the Sookie Stackhouse novels like Sookie Stackhouse pounded through the magical hunks of Bon Temps.

Some of the characters from the novels are written through until death, some of them get a happy ever after type ending, but all of these brief, connected, short pieces of prose tell stories, narratives, fictional lives, quickly and coherently and emotively and beautifully and with charm and flare and charisma and humanity.

This is, I have to say, the greatest collection of flash fiction I have ever read.

I sat on that night bus as it swung through late night, late Spring, London and I grinned and I smiled and I guffawed and I wept, too, I wept over and over and over again.

This isn’t simple score settling or pandering to losers desperate for a happy ending, there are tragedies and heartbreaks here, there are childhood deaths due to congenital heart defects, there are marriages destroyed after corrosion by deceit or unaligned values, there are deaths and murders, there are power struggles and there is tedium, but there is, yes, a happy and fulfilling future mapped out for all of the characters I cared most about, with hunky Viking vampire Eric Northman moving on but never quite getting over Sookie, with Bill Compton buying his way to vampire power after building a video games empire, and with Sam Merlotte and Sookie Stackhouse living a long and happy life as caring, well-matched, respectful spouses.

If you don’t know who any of these people are, I don’t know why you’re still reading this, but if you do know who they are, then you probably understand why it was such a relief, such a pleasure and a balm, to once again find myself able to sit with these fictional people in yet another excellent book.

Sure, it’s short. Sure, it’s redundant. But it’s so much fun and so much pleasure and so much Sookie Stackhouse Bon Temps, that it’s absolutely worth reading for anyone who has read the rest of the series.

Yeah, not much more to say on this.

If it’s for you, it’s for you. If it’s not, again, what are you doing here?

Live a little. Read some Sookie Stackhouse.

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1. I don’t mean it’s a building I own, I mean it’s the building I live within. I, of course, own nothing lol – to quote a line from my current stand up routine, “I’m so poor I’m buying non-organic oat milk!” (Please keep me in Minor Figures by donating via this link 🙏🙏🙏) ↩︎