Counter-lobotomy

Author Charlaine Harris posted on her Facebook page the cover of the last novel of the Southern Vampires Mysteries, Dead Ever After, to be published in May 2013. 

The books are better known as the Sookie Stackhouse series, and for seven years they were known only to fantasy porn geeks. Then in 2008 HBO made them into a TV series called True Blood, which at the moment has covered the first six books and aired the fifth season last summer. Today True Blood is a most seen on the channel, and it is watched not only by fantasy porn geeks. How the hell did this happen?

Still from True Blood credits

The Southern Vampires Mysteries portrays a society very similar to ours and implicitly criticises it through the literary strategy of dislocation, in this case reached through the fantastic element. Since the first chapters of the first novel Dead Until Dark, the casual observations of the narrator protagonist hint at drug, sexual disease, the power of media and religion, violence, conscience and ignorance. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

The setting in the small fictional town of Bon Temps, Lousiana, implies terrible accent, square minded people devoted to bar talks, affected religious prissiness and scorn of anything a bit out of the ordinary. Vampires coexist with humans thanks to the invention of a synthetic liquid called Tru Blood. This doesn’t mean the undead completely stopped feeding on people, or that the latter consider vampires their equals: they either despise them as nature abominations, (illegally) sell their blood as drug or aim at their überhuman sexual skills.

Discrimination is a constant towards vampires, and it is further explored when other supernatural creatures are introduced. Werewolves and other wereanimals, fairies and witches disguise their identity for fear of human judgement, and after a while you start wondering if there are ‘normal’ people at all and what normal is. Sookie herself is considered crazy because she can read people’s mind, and not acceptance makes her see her gift as a disability. Also, all the characters, the main ones as the minor ones, have secrets to hide, which makes the whole scenario a big fat lie. There’s no such thing as a simple trouble-free life, even for rural Southern flowers.

Still from True Blood credits

The concept of authority comes up in many different variants, from the influence of religious and political institutions, to the monarchic order of the vampire world, more similar to feudal Middle Ages than 2012 America. Or, is it there any difference? Fear, control of the masses, manipulation of laws make men miserable, not fantastic creatures.

Vampires’ lack of conscience and cruelty are driven by nature, yet some of them oppose to this nonsense. Werewolves embody mob mentality, with the pack master ruling and expecting loyalty from his pack members. Fairies symbolise the evil rotting the insides of a beautiful creature. There are no heroes, many villains, and a lot of shades inbetween.

During all this turmoil and the unhappy incidents, all the characters deal with family, love and friendships, showing the hypocrisy but also the strength of bonds. These types of relationships are almost unified in that between a vampire and his maker, also implying that procreation is an act of love and not of selfishness. The human side of humans and not humans is as prominent as their dishuman side.

Between the end of a love and the start of a new war there is also time for a laugh. And when you don’t laugh with the characters you laugh at them: sometimes they are so silly, it is too easy to mock them. And probably this is how clever critique attracts the average reader through light-hearted adventurous stories you dedicate yourself to non to think too much. Charlaine Harris sweetened the medicine of social criticism with the honey of sex, thriller and fantasy.

But maybe I’m overthinking this, I see conspiracy where there is only food for the masses, this is just entertaining fantasy to distract people’s mind from real life. To quote the fifth book of the series, Dead as a Doornail, “Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.”

The thirteenth and last book of the Sookie Stackhouse series