Dead Until Dark

"Okay, this is in here mainly because I love Charlaine. She is one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met in the writing business, she’s wonderful. We were freshmen together. The same spring that my book came out, Dead Until Dark came out as well. There’s a whole bunch of mystery sub-genres, and the cosy mystery is a big one. It’s small town issues, and how you deal with those problems. What are the unique facets of those sorts of mysteries? This is what Charlaine has done, except she’s also added in vampires who have recently come out of the closet, and all sorts of supernatural beings are appearing. The vampires were able to make themselves public because of the development of true blood, this synthetic blood supplement that vampires can drink, so they don’t have to hurt humans anymore. They can come out and be normal like everyone else. But of course they like the way they live their life, and they like drinking from people and so on. So it’s a very mixed bag – some vampires are sincere about the new start; some of them are not really sincere but they’re using it as a way to gain clout and power and money, so they have to live up to it; and some of them say nope, I’m a bad guy and I’m going to stay a bad guy – they’re perfectly happy that way. Sookie is a brilliant PI. She’s a telepath: she can read people’s thoughts, and she can sometimes pick up on things that have happened in places when she’s around them. She’s an empath, she can read strong emotions very easily. So she herself is a weird outcast, and as a result she’s neither fully human nor fully supernatural – she exists, again, as that go-between for the normal world and supernatural world. That spot is really where all the supernatural private eyes hang out. And Sookie is great, because she has all this ability to learn information, which makes her very dangerous; but physically speaking, she is as helpless as a regular human being. So she has to be very careful about what she says and what she reveals, even who she hangs around with or looks at for too long. It would be very hard to live your life as Sookie Stackhouse! She’s also one of those characters who builds up a network of favours: people who like her, or want to work with her, or have a crush on her… Her entire existence is about balancing out these interests and powers, and trying to figure out how she’s going to survive until tomorrow. I enjoyed the hell out of these books. They had a very different take on things: how do we integrate all these weird supernatural elements into regular society? Some of them work pretty well, some of them are fantastic, and some of them do not work out at all; and at the same time, humans can be just awful. How do you get everybody to get along, when nobody wants to get along? I often felt that Sookie was the only adult in the room, and she has to figure out how to get all the kids to play nice together."