Goth Chick News: Sookie Soon to be Dead Ever After
It was 2003 when the publicist for an emerging author contacted the Black Gate office to ask if someone wanted to interview her client, Charlaine Harris. Ms. Harris was on tour for book number three of her vampire/mystery/romance series starring a telepathic cocktail waitress named Sookie Stackhouse.
I agreed to do it, having read the first two books and liking them well enough, but not loving them… yet.
At least the vampires in this series were dangerous, murderous blood suckers and not sparkly, angsty, tree-huggers.
Ms. Harris and I met for lunch at an Italian restaurant, prior to her proceeding to the local Borders book store where she was doing a reading. She was the quintessential Southern lady with impeccable table manners and an incredible imagination.
I found myself hanging on her every word.
At the time, no one could have predicted that only a few months later Alan Ball, stuck at an airport while on a business trip for his current HBO project Six Feet Under, would pick up Ms. Harris’s first two books to pass the time. Ball would fall hard for Sookie and subsequently begin pursuing both her and her creator in earnest as source material for a new HBO series he would eventually call True Blood (now in its sixth year and the first without Ball at the helm).
So here we are, one decade and eight books later, and about to bid Sookie goodbye for good; Charlaine Harris’s twelfth and final tale in the series, Dead Ever After, is ready to hit the shelves next month.
It’s tempting to come up with some cheap shot punchline about how tax returns are a subgenre of fantasy literature. I’d poke at the puzzle longer, but I believe in the rule of law, so my tax returns are a good-faith attempt at nonfiction. There are times when I wish I hadn’t been drawn up as a Lawful Good character — goodness knows I tried at least to be Chaotic, but I could never keep it up for long.
