Dead Until Dark

The new "hot" show on HBO? Well, there's actually a bunch of them, but the one that piqued my fancy was "True Blood" which now has season 1 out on DVD. Zombies are a bit played out at this point, but vampires more or less are still cool, although they are deviating more and more into essentially romance figures, something that has always been part of their lore, but more recently with Anne Rice, and Twilight have become more female oriented.

Dead Until Dark is no exception. The story can appeal to anyone: a world where vampires are real, and synthetic blood allows them to live a public life. Also in this world, other supernatural creatures exists, like werewolves, shapeshifters, telepaths and maenads. In fact, our heroine, Sookie Stackhouse is a telepath herself.

In some bookstores, you'll find Charlene Harris' work under science fiction, but in some, it's more appropriately filed under mystery, and that's the backdrop for these books: crime committed, characters shown, mystery unraveled, killer revealed. Interestingly enough, in a world full of once thought imaginary creatures, more often than not the heinous crimes are committed to and by ordinary humans.

They're all good stories, but my major beef is that the estrogen seeps through these stories quite often. Sookie and her vampire boyfriend Bill are constantly having sex, no sorry, "making love". Seriously, like every chapter. Sci-Fi is okay, mystery can be entertaining, but I don't want to read romance books! I'm hoping that this is not par for the course when it's a female writer, as, like I said, they seem to delve on the romantic aspects of the vampire lore.

Overall, this is a good book. I've got to imagine that the screen adaptation is better because at points this book becomes essentially pornographic with Sookie and Bill and their constant lovemaking. HBO, while it would show this, would not want to delve on it to the point the book seems to. For all of you guys out there that would rather take a pass on movies like Twilight, I'm not sure that this book is really different enough from that vampire/romance genre to please you and you might be better off skipping it. People who enjoy that genre will like this book.