Charlaine Harris – couldreads

Given that it’s almost True Blood season, I found myself moderately excited—moderately—for the newest Sookie Stackhouse book, Deadlocked, which came out earlier this month. I say moderately because I am of the humble opinion that Harris has been phoning it in for a few years now, and/or ran out of supernatural creatures to cast in her increasingly redundant series.

Phoning it in can be a death knell for any author—to be discussed further when I review the latest Augusten Burroughs book, whose lack of substance is depressing me greatly. But Harris—as much as I love the fact that she’s inadvertently generated one of the most ridiculously fun shows on television—didn’t have much room to fall. The Sookie Stackhouse books are like Anne Rice for dimwits, and rival Twilight for the title of worst-written vampire series of all time (editor’s note: I have read about three vampires series and thus am wildly unqualified to make this claim.)

In a nutshell, this is how a Sookie Stackhouse novel goes:

I am alive!

I know you were worried; to be honest, so was I. A six-day bender with two friends/former Marines in town for Fleet Week meant not only was I not getting the enough reading done—about 12 collective pages last week—but there were moments when I thought not enough brain cells would survive for me to ever read again. At least not anything outside of Goosebumps.

To add insult to injury, said friends were staying in my apartment which, as I’ve mentioned, is fairly covered in unread books, many of which interested said friends and spawned conversations that made me stare longingly at my bookshelf and wish I were curled up with a novel instead of arguing with bouncers in the Meatpacking District over the merits of jorts as a fashion statement (I am decidedly in favor; they, not so much.) Long story short, my brief sojourn into the life of an actually sociable person was exciting, but I see myself at no point in the immediate future becoming the kind of girl who changes bars as often as I currently change positions on the couch.

Fortunately for us all, this week’s book was…let us just say, not so much a challenge. I mean, what does one say about the Southern Vampire Mysteries—(they’re called the Southern Vampire Mysteries, for fuck’s sake)—the 11-and-counting titles upon which HBO’s True Blood is based. They’re vapid and simplistic and, only a hop, skip and a jump away from erotica. They take the intellectual capacity of a 9-year-old to read, or dog of above-average intelligence. They’re repetitive—about 25% of each book is devoted to retelling the events of the book before—and undeveloped. Oh, and they’re prettay prettay good.

Tag: Charlaine Harris

Dead boring

The quick and the dead