Dead Until Dark, Living Dead in Dallas, Club Dead, Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris

[lightreads]

Meet Sookie Stackhouse, waitress in small town Louisiana. She can (entirely inexplicably) read minds. Vampires have just “come out of the closet” into mainstream society, and Sookie’s talents and romances draw her into their world where she deals with weres, shifters, evil witches, and supernatural killers.

These books are of the new and flourishing urban fantasy/romance hybrid, and the best description I can come up with for them is “not unreadable.” The writing is unremarkable, Sookie is livable – she is at least very much a product of her geography, as she can be laughably provincial – and the vampire love interests have sex appeal and vampire angst cut from the same cardboard stock – which is to say they elicit the same distant bemusement in me. Sookie starts out as the overlooked virgin, but then becomes the sudden focus of lust for four or five men as the books progress; what? This is what women want to read about, right?

All of which is entirely unremarkable in its general dullness, except for the part where Sookie calls her telepathy her “disability.” And hey, it purportedly stunted her social interactions and made school difficult, and hurray for the social model of constructed disability. But it got seriously up my nose anyway, big time. Partly because it’s just so disingenuous and downright unlikely coming from someone so ignorant and unworldly (Sookie comments at one point that her local sheriff just got disabled bathrooms installed for the first time), and partly because it felt so deeply presumptuous to me personally (this response is both less valid and less analytical, but there you go).

Also, on the topic of things that made me go “erp!” let me describe this scene to you. Our heroine has just been deflowered by cardboard vampire lover number one. Predictably it hurt, followed by waves of shattering pleasure. After the fact, she asks when they can do it again, and cardboard vampire says a few days to give her a chance to heal. But, you see, vampire blood has healing properties, so Sookie is all “why don’t you just . . .” and cardboard vampire goes “oh!” and cuts his fingers open and – well. You've got an imagination.

You know something? There are times when someone’s kink comes whizzing past your ear and you just watch it go in vague bemusement because hey, whatever floats their boat. And there are other times where you just really did not want to know that about your author. Ick.

Anyway. You’ll note I did read a small stack of these books, because brainless really is a positive quality sometimes. But this genre has a lot better fare to offer – I strongly recommend Kim Harrison over these books, on every measure.

Comments

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

I think I read the first one of those, and my reaction was "meh". You know a story is bad when recent Laurell K Hamilton books are more interesting.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

I still haven't gotten to the Hamilton, actually. I feel it's sort of my duty to at least start the vampire ones, and at this point I'm so raveningly curious. Vastly forewarned, though.