Charlaine Harris

We are looking at how Rice's core concept of the ostracized monster functions when it hits an entire society at once.

We are looking at The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris, widely known as the source material for the television series True Blood.

This is a fascinating evolution of the premise.

The text notes, "These books tell the story of a Southern town that becomes deeply divided when vampires decide to come out of the closet and publicly reveal their existence to the world."

Louis felt isolated from humanity because of what he was.

It was a deeply personal, lonely existential crisis.

Charlaine Harris takes that theme of ostracization and scales it up to a societal systemic level.

It becomes political.

Okay.

We're reading Dead Until the-- We read Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris.

Yes.

Yes.

Moving on, we shift from ghosts and psychics to vampires, specifically focusing on vampires meet social commentary.

And we have to start with a text that basically defined modern vampire mysteries, Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris.

This is a massively influential text, primarily because of how drastically it re-engineered the way we treat supernatural creatures in modern fiction.

Right.

We meet Sookie Stackhouse, a mind-reading waitress working in a small town in Louisiana.

She gets swept into investigating a string of local murders shortly after she starts dating a handsome vampire who walks into her bar.

bar.What Charlaine Harris executed so effectively was the total domestication of the vampire.

The domestication?

Woofere shifts the focus back to authorial intent.

They bring up Charlaine Harris, the author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels that became the massively successful show True Blood.

A great example.

Woofere points out that Harris actually preferred the showrunners to use her characters to tell new stories.

[laughs]

One of the customs that Charlaine Harris abides by is that vampires need to be invited into your house.

Mm.

And so there are many moments in my reading of those books where I'm not sure if Bill is not entering the house out of respect or if it's because at some point Sookie's asked him not to.

I had another question for you.

There was another very famous vampire series that I feel like had romance or at least romantic elements by like a Charlene Harris.

I can't guarantee that's her name.

I feel like it was set in like Louisiana or the South.

Uh, this brings me to one of the questions I love to wa- uh, ask, um, people, which is, like, do you have favorite openings? Um, I think when you're an author and you're kind of early in your craft stage, you know, it's so helpful to read openings that always really draw you in, like your comfort read or your favorite hook or whatever.

And for me, it was, um, Charlaine Harris, True Blood.

Like, she opens in, um, with Sookie Stackhouse, and immediately you find out she can read everyone's mind except for the vampires' mind.

And it just tells you everything you need to know about this world and about Sookie, um, and, uh, foreshadows her coming relationship with vampires.