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Deadlocked (Sookie Stackhouse #12) by Charlaine Harris.

Reviewed by Marlyn Beebe.

Felipe de Castro, the vampire king of Louisiana, is visiting Shreveport.  A party is being held in his honor at the home of Eric Northman, and Sookie's presence is requested.  She walks in on Eric feeding from a young woman, and is (understandably) upset.  Though Eric orders the girl to leave, his response is noticeably sluggish.  When she's found dead soon afterward, Sookie realizes that Eric has been set up.

What is difficult to determine is the reason for the elaborate plan, and just who concocted it.

On top of this, Sookie has to deal with the rest of her life, as complicated as ever.  She's now an investor in Merlotte's Bar & Grill, having lent Sam some money for structural repairs, and therefore has more responsibility. Sam's girlfriend Jannalynn is deeply jealous of Sookie's friendship with him, and is making their working relationship very difficult.

Tara is expecting twins very soon, and though her boutique is doing well, she and her husband JB are worried about finances. Sookie's fae housemates Dermot and Claude are homesick, since the portal to their homeland was closed and they're unable to go back and forth as they once did.  And she also has to keep the magical cluviel dor safe while she decides what to do with it.

Sookie, who has always been remarkably forbearing about her complicated life, is starting to feel stressed.  She's annoyed that Eric is distant and uncommunicative, and feels caught between the various factions of supernaturals, all of whom seem to think she should be on their "side".

Make sure you start this book when you have nothing else planned:  you won't want to put it down until you reach the end.

Charlaine Harris

 That this is the penultimate installment in the series has been known for some time.  On May 14th, it was announced on Charlaine Harris' facebook page that the final novel in the Sookie Stackhouse series, Dead Ever After, will be released on 3 May 2013.  This is not the first time that Harris has ended a series when she thought the story had run its course; she did the same with the Aurora Teagarden books, the Shakespeare series (protagonist Lily Bard did make a visit to Bon Temps early in the series)  and the Harper Connelly series.  





FTC full disclosure:  Many thanks to my step-daughter for lending me the book so I wouldn't have to wait for months to get a copy from the library!

Vampires, and Werewolves, and Faeries! Oh My!

Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris.

Reviewed by Marlyn Beebe.

In the unputdownable eleventh Sookie Stackhouse novel, Sookie is minding her own business, waitressing at Merlotte's, providing room and board for two of her faerie relatives, and just being the girlfriend of the vampire sheriff of Louisiana when a Molotov cocktail is thrown through the window of the bar while she's at work. Luckily, she's not seriously hurt, nor is the building. Sookie and Sam at first assume that it's the work of militant weres, angry because Sam has forced the two-natured to "come out".

Meanwhile, Sookie is troubled by the bond between herself and Eric Northman (her husband, by vampire standards), which allows them to sense strong emotions in each other. She knows that Eric is deeply troubled by something, the details of which he won't share with her. And everything they do is monitored closely by the new vampire King.

The popularity of this series has grown since it was made into the television series True Blood in 2008, and with the help of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series (both books and films), the subject of vampires has become an international craze.

Yet vampires have actually been part of popular culture since before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, based on a folk legend, in 1897. Stoker might also have looked to John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) and Carmilla (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu. Then there was Annie Rice's Interview with a Vampire series in the 1970s and 80s, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series in the 1990s and early 2000s.

It has been theorized that in the 19th Century, vampires symbolized the male as a predator versus the innocence of the female in a "paternalist world in which women were constantly threatened by seducers, and the consequences of pregnancy outside of marriage really were life and death"*.

And today? Grady Hendrix on Slate says "Many male vampires are portrayed in popular media as sensitive, literate and emotionally available, the ideal for a lot of women."

Though Eric Northman may be literate and is very sensitive to Sookie due to their special bond, he is definitely not emotionally available. This is especially evident in Dead Reckoning as he refuses to tell Sookie what is disturbing him until she finally guesses. Of course, Sookie doesn't open up to Eric much, either, but it can be argued that she's just a woman trying to cope with an unusual amount of stress.

What do you think?

*Peter Logan, Professor of English at Temple University, Philadelphia.