Title: Dead Until Dark<\/p>\n
Author: Charlaine Harris<\/p>\n
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy<\/p>\n
All right, all right, I enjoyed a vampire book. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to dislike this book. I kept looking for reasons to put it down, but it wouldn’t let me. So now I have to admit, not that I read a vampire romance novel (which I have done before), but that I liked one.<\/p>\n
I picked this book up because I’ve been on a mission to find good contemporary fantasy and sooner or later, you’re going to have to read some vampire stuff. There’s just too much of it out there to avoid. I failed to put it down because I loved Sookie and the narrative voice was fantastic — it just drew me right in.<\/p>\n
Character. Character. Character. I probably sound like a broken record on these reviews, but there it is. I like strong, smart, vulnerable characters who don’t resort to melodramatic stunts that by all rights ought to get them killed.\u00a0 Sookie was all those things — and she still came close to dying once or twice.<\/p>\n
Before I recommend this book, I ought to try to explain why this worked for me where other vampire romances fail: First, there’s the world building. Vampires aren’t all the same from universe to universe, and they have some pretty extreme differences. On the one hand you have Bram Stoker’s monsters, which are frankly my default. They kill people. On the other hand, you have immortals with all of the advantages and none of the pitfalls. Oh, they’re not really that bad, they just drink animal blood and act like humans. Ok, then what’s the point?\u00a0 Charlaine Harris has created a workable middle ground. Her vampires are dangerous killers, but they don’t have to kill to survive. They can just drink a little blood from a person or even survive on synthetics (though they don’t like it).<\/p>\n
The second issue I often have with vampire romance is the woman’s rationale for hooking up with a walking corpse. I can’t think of many reasons to do this, but Sookie has reasons that worked for me.<\/p>\n
The final reason I often hate vampire romance is cheesiness or melodrama, neither of which were present in this book. Well, maybe a little cheese — it’s hard not to get a little cheesy when you’re talking about vampires — but nothing really made me cringe. Everyone behaved in consistent, sensible ways. The danger came from the situation; it wasn’t forced onto the page with overwriting or overacting. (I swear even in books characters can overact sometimes.)<\/p>\n
Rating: 4\/5 stars<\/p>\n
Recommended to those who enjoy contemporary fantasy, even if you’ve had bad luck with vampires in the past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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