Club Dead / Charlaine Harris

Club Dead

category: fantasy, author:

Charlaine Harris

book 3 of True Blood
original copyright 2003,
read in Jul 2011

Agamedes' opinion: 6 out of 10

A book from a series which has spawned a tv series. What more can I say?

Well...

Several books in this series had been written before 2005, the copyright year of Twilight. If anything is derivative, it's Twilight. Which just goes to show:

Sure, you can copy the idea: ordinary girl loves vampire, gets tangled up in vampire world. Faces vampire-related dangers. But you can still make it better.

Club Dead gets off to a slow start. At least, it seems slow... perhaps because I'm starting with the third book in the series. I have not had time to learn to love the heroine -- nor to understand her relationship with her vampire lover.

The book stars Sookie Stackhouse. Does the author know what sooky is to an Australian? Try, "complaining, whingeing, sad; jealous." And that exactly describes the Sookie of the story. Especially at the start, as she fails to cope with the apparent loss of affection from her vampire lover.

Is he worth the effort of caring? Not as far as I can tell from this book. Perhaps there is reason to care, in the previous two books.

Then there's the vampire race.

Apparently, vampires have now come out of the closet. Thanks to TrueBlood, an artificial blood substitute, vampires can now live without human blood. No need to kill for a living. All may now be forgiven.

What?!

After centuries of blood-sucking murder... All may now be forgiven?!

It's not like these are animals with no choice other than to kill or die. These are the same individuals who chose to kill humans. Yet they always had a choice: yes, they do have the ability to suck just a little blood. Yet they chose to kill.

And the humans now say, Oh well, that was terrible, well what the heck, forgive and forget.

Perhaps there was vampire guilt and apology in the first books. No sign of it now. Now, it's just lord-of-the-manor style, human victims but willing, do what we want, vampires out of the closet. With their own government, their own laws and their own might-is-right system of settling disputes.

Appealing to those who wish to be slaves, perhaps.

The vampire social model is awful. The book itself -- after a slow start -- is readable action.

..o0o..

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