From Dead To Worse
a paranormal fantasy book by Charlaine Harris
Author’s site | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 7/10
This is the eighth book in the Southern Vampire series. They have been variable. Generally if the book is set anywhere aside from Bon Temps, Louisiana, it was mediocre. Although I find the mechanics of vampire travel very interesting, Sookie herself is so discombobulated whenever she’s out of the boonies that all of her internal monologues are about crap I couldn’t care less about. When Sookie is at home, most of what happens that I find eye-blinkingly Southern is glossed over and disregarded as normal. It makes the books less alien that way because we’re all pretending fictional rural Louisiana shares a common culture with anywhere else in America.
Sookie started out her adventures in paranormal life (her interactions with vampires and were creatures and other weirdnesses) largely due to her own weirdness of being a telepath in a small town. She was more than a little insane from not being able to block that out, but in the first book, she meets a vampire and his mind is silent. There’s a lot of lust, rather graphic, and we see a gory mystery solved. It was satisfying but a bit formulaic until I realized that the first vampire was a very low-level peon vampire. That made it different from Laurell K. Hamilton’s books where her central character only meets the kings and gods of the paranormal enclaves.
I really enjoyed the first book in the series. I enjoyed some of the stories in the other books too. But this was the first book that came close to approaching my enjoyment from the first book. Most of the reason for this is that Sookie didn’t spend a lot of time interacting with neighbors and humans or working. Sookie didn’t spend a lot of time with the were creatures— who really are less vivid than Ms. Harris’s vampires. Sookie’s boyfriend issues took a back seat, which is a relief because she hasn’t really seemed attached to any of them since that first vampire who dumped her viciously and violently for his old girlfriend. It’s hard to think of a book as a romantic adventure when it seems like meaningless sex.
This eighth book brought back a lot of favorite characters and used residual Katrina mess to kill off some really lame characters. If someone had gone through and done an audience screening, I don’t think they could have done a better job gleaning the wheat.
The whole Southern vibe this series has rubs me the wrong way a lot of the time. In this book, Sookie comes to a dead stop when a man says he wants to check her house over for intruders and she insists she’s fine, so he says he wants a Coke and her upbringing won’t let her not jump on that immediately. I would be all like “There’s the ‘fridge, yo.” Well, not really, because I’m an educated woman who doesn’t mock the uneducated urban culture. In a previous book Alcide shows up first thing in the morning and is offered coffee, he says he wants breakfast. When he’s offered eggs, he asks for sausage too. What I didn’t understand is why did Sookie date him then? A man who acts like that isn’t looking for a partner in life, he’s looking for a slave he can have sex with. But Sookie doesn’t think anything of it. Sookie goes to a high school football game in one book, she dresses up for this with hair ribbons that match the team colors…. first no one goes to high school ball games unless they know one of the players— if unchilded adults went to high school football games here someone would think they’re likely pedophiles. Second, how old is she that she wants matching hair ribbons? There’s a lot of just plain weird stuff that the author describes Sookie as doing or thinking or accepting as normal that is completely anathema to me.
I would really like to see stories written in this universe that aren’t set in hell and starring someone who acts as blonde as she looks. The vampire mythology, the magic system in use, the were creatures, the intra- and inter-relationships of the paranormal groups are all very interesting, but the whole thing really suffers from being set in a part of the country where they still burn crosses on people’s lawns.
What I like about the characters who are my favorites is that they’re from a city in Louisiana and they cynically market their own vampirism to tourists. They come across as normal kinds of people. I’d like to read books which just have those kinds of characters and leave the bumpkins alone.
If you are considering other books by this author, be warned that the Grave series contains graphic consenting incest in its third book. The author has some very Southern ideas about what family means and I brought that squick with me to her other series.
None of this explains why I liked it, and I did. I like vampire stories. I like stories where the heroine doesn’t start out at the top because the author is lazy. But mostly I like non-horror vampire stories.
