No point in separating this into two reviews: the Sookie Stackhouse novels, as they're called (the inspiration for the True Blood series on HBO), are delicious genre trash, perfectly suitable for beach reading, and ultimately disposable. The books all serve the same purpose - mildly entertaining titillation - and save for the plot differences, are largely interchangeable. I'd say there's no point in continuing once you've read one or two, but I fully intend to buy another this week to sustain me between bouts of "real" reading. They're cheap and safe, and perhaps that's the ultimate goal of any genre fiction, after all.
Here's what you need to know, if you know nothing about the books or the series (like me, two weeks ago): Sookie Stackhouse is a "barmaid" in small-town Louisiana who, like so many genre heroines these days (Twilight, anyone?), gets romantically involved with a vampire and is inevitably drawn into his shadowy, supernatural world. In Sookie's world, vampires have recently come out of the closet because of the development of synthetic blood (TrueBlood) that allows them to exist in normal society without feeding on humans. It's an interesting concept, but that's not really the point. Obvs. The novels are mixes of fantasy, horror, romance, and mystery, and Harris dances among all these genres while blithely ignoring whatever rules they have established. She uses mysteries as her plot engine, but the mysteries are hardly dire or revelatory. She uses fantasy and horror elements as her setting (e.g., vampires, shapeshifters, etc.), but since there's little to discover and/or resolve about the existence of the supernatural in American society (as the real conflict would have taken place in the preceding years, when vampires came out into society), they rarely function as more than local color. Where Harris really shows her stripes is in her use of romance motifs and erotica, the scenes of which she obviously relishes and which provide some of the more satisfying elements of the novels.
The novels' strongest aspect is its central narrator, Sookie Stackhouse, who wavers between camp and pathos, but who is undoubtedly the glue that holds together all the technical elements in play. Sookie grounds the novels in, if not true reality, at least a reality that's vaguely familiar, something that lurks just on the other side of the veil in a simpler world largely created by fiction that needs simplicity to function but that occasionally breaks through the veil to reveal authentic motivation and character. Sookie is, inevitably, a character of genre fiction and so must operate within that realm, but underneath her faux-deep-South roots, affected poor-girl persona, and seeming endless delight in fancy clothes, lie sparks of a more developed character that Harris doesn't quite have the talent to fully realize.
It is, however, refreshing, after a solid year of frenzy produced by giddy teenagers, their giddy moms, and subsequently everyone else over the Twilight series (works of pure YA genre fiction dressed up in clever marketing and buoyed by Harry Potter-esque hype), to have a female narrator who has some agency, and Harris seems to be aware of the need for Sookie to be a strong, funny narrator in order to compete with the colorful supernatural (and predominately male) characters with whom she interacts. At times, this awareness can lead to a heavy hand, as when Sookie repeatedly reminds the reader how strong she is, or how she has her own mind, no matter what her boyfriend might say, et al., yet Sookie does play the necessary role in shaping events and taking matters into her own hands.
Harris falls prey to some of the more irritating tropes of the romance genre: the sex as violence motif is obviously worked to its fullest advantage, and there's plenty of gender stereotyping, though the male characters fall prey to this more than Sookie herself. Still, Harris does draw a clear line between S&M play and true sexual violence, which is far more than I can say for Stephanie Meyer and the bizarre sexuality demonstrated throughout the Twilight novels.
Clearly it's impossible not to draw a comparison between Twilight and the Sookie Stackhouse novels, but it's only because they've enjoyed their popularity at the same time. Sookie precedes Twilight by a good few years, and though both exhibit clear (and occasionally nauseating) trends in genre fiction, at least Charlaine Harris isn't trying to be anything else. She's embraced her career as a genre writer and has kept her books mercifully clear of allegory (::cough:: Stephanie Meyers?)... and on top of it all, has written some damn diverting novels in the process. Bravo.
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