“DEAD UNTIL DARK” BY CHARLAINE HARRIS

This is the first novel in a series of books introducing Sookie Stackhouse, a small-town waitress in Louisiana, who has a gift (or a curse, depending how one looks at it) for reading people’s minds. This ability prevents her from forming any type of close relationship (forget sex) with anyone so she mostly keeps to herself. Until one night a vampire enters the bar where she works. He’s tall, dark and handsome and, bets of all, Sookie cannot hear his thoughts. A perfect man she’s been waiting for… But Bill has a bad reputation for hanging around with a wrong crowd of creepy and violent vampires and when murders start occurring, Sookie fears, she’s the next victim…

And thus the story begins… Unfortunately, it is yet another novel where a vampire falls for a girl and a girl falls for a vampire. Quite predictable, to be honest. Although the story may have an element of novelty in it, it is terribly written with simple sentences and basic vocabulary on the fourth grade level, which makes reading it somewhat annoying. Moreover, it really doesn’t do the story any justice. Instead of speeding the flow of the narration (as it would normally be the case), it disrupts it. It reminds me of walking on the gravel road barefoot and constantly stumbling on the rocks. Not a pleasant experience, now is it?

Furthermore, not only does it take place in a small, middle-of-nowhere town in Louisiana, it seeps the southernism from every word and every page. Thus, instead of giving the vampire story a reality twist (as I hope was the author’s intention), it takes away the glamour usually accompanying any narrative featuring a vampire as a main character. And without it, it simply stumbles from page to page trying to tell us a tale of supernatural in the back woods of Louisiana. Ugh!