Dead After Dark

I was kind of excited to read Dead After Dark at first. I had heard a lot from my friends who have seen True Blood, all of them saying that the show was great, full of social commentary and allegory. I personally had never seen it, but I was sure that the book would be pretty cool considering how loved the show is. However, I felt like the book just fell kind of flat. Sookie was a better character than others we have read about, mainly Bella, but she still seemed helpless at some points, and was consistently annoying throughout. I was most bothered by Sookie when her grandmother died though, as she seemed to not really care too much. Elvis un-alive as Bubba was funny and a cool part to add the story, even if it was only for comedic affect.

The thing that really got to me about the entire book though was what I was expecting: I heard so much about how True Blood had a great plot about race relations and the gay community, but all that seemed to come out of the book was a throw away line about Vampires being out of the closet. Had Harris put more focus on the other characters in the book, telling more about their struggles and lives, I think I would have enjoyed the book a lot more. Instead we ended up with the chronicles of Sookie and Bill's love affair and a half-assed mystery story that has a fairly anticlimactic ending, with the murderer as someone who did not really matter in the story.

Maybe I am just being a jerk, but I really wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. And I also can't shake the feeling that all of the authors of all the books we have read just really want to have sex with vampires.