Book Review: Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

Dead Until Dark

By Charlaine Harris

Release Date: January 1, 2001

Source: Bought Book

Summary: Sookie Stackhouse is a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. She's quite, keeps to herself, and doesn't get out much. Not because she's not pretty. She is. It's just that, well, Sookie has this sort of "disability." She can read minds. And that doesn't make her too dateable. And then along comes Bill. He's tall, dark, handsome - and Sookie can't hear a word he's thinking. He's exactly the type of guy she's been waiting for all her life....

But Bill has a disability of his own: he's a vampire with a bad reputation. He hangs with a seriously creepy crowd, all suspected of - big surprise - murder. And when one of Sookie's coworkers is killed, she fears she's next....

Review: This summer, my sister and I watched the first three seasons of True Blood in about three weeks. We were obsessed with the show and couldn't get enough of the southern charm and possessive vampires. I knew the show was based off of a very popular book series, so I decided to read the first one, hoping it would be as amazing as the show! Though it didn't live up to the awesomeness of the show, the book was still a fun story with fun characters. 

Sookie is definitely an interesting character! When she first sees a vampire walk into the bar she works at, her first instinct isn't to run or whisper like everyone else in the small town of Bon Temps, but rather she basically skips up to him and asks his order. The only problem with this (aside from vampires wanting to drink her blood) is that there's a killer on the loose in that southern town who is killing of waitresses who've been known to fraternize with vampires (basically, women just like Sookie). But Sookie's hardheaded personality doesn't let anything scare her from doing whatever she feels like. 

Not only is this a fun paranormal book, but it has an added bit of mystery to it! Though I already knew who the killer was from the show, anyone else would be in for a mystery that is very hard to solve until the last pages! Was it her brother, who's known to sleep with any woman who breathes, including all of the murdered victims? Or was it the dark, brooding vampire Bill who Sookie can't seem to stop thinking about? I guess you'll have to wait and see! 

The vampires have such different personalities and I love them all (well, at least the nice ones)! Bill is a perfect gentleman and not even close to the monster most people have seen vampires as once they "came out of the closet." I think that's why Sookie is so smitten with him! What's surprising about this book, though, was how quickly things passed by! It took the entire first season of the show to get through what this one book did. I kind of liked the pacing better because it never got too boring and something new was already happening. 

So overall, this was a fun, quick, and quirky paranormal read! Some parts were better than the show while others were not as great, but it was still great on it's own! If you're a paranormal fan who wants a new, fun read, then the Sookie Stackhouse series is definitely for you!