I finished Dead Until Dark last weekend, and decided I liked the book enough to continue. Charlaine Harris has four more books in the series, so on Tuesday, I ordered three of them from Chapters.Indigo.ca (a million times better than Amazon.ca if you’re buying straight-up books, btw. They ship them separately if one book is going to hold up the order, and the books arrive lickedy-split!). I avoided getting the hardcover, since they’re way more expensive and I wasn’t sure that I was going to like the series enough to warrant at $30 purchase.

They showed up on Thursday, and I finished the final two yesterday.

Elena bought me Dead Until Dark because the books are being made into an HBO series (she thought we should have a head start). The setting is definitely HBO-worthy—a rural Louisiana bar, a 150-year-old house, and a vampire club where most people are tourists looking for their first glimpse of a real vampire. Vampires have just “come out of the coffin,” so people are still getting used to having vamps as neighbours. The characters are neat: There’s telepathic barmaid Sookie, the buxom blonde who doesn’t date because who wants to hear your boyfriend bitching about your giant ass when you’re trying to get it on?; her brother, Jason, who’d be well suited for the phrase “the village bike” if guys ever caught flack for being huge whores; her boss, the cute-yet-ineffectual Sam, whose mind Sookie’s never really gotten a good read on; Vampire Bill, the first vampire the small town has ever seen; and his boss, Eric, the tall, blonde former (not Minnesota) Viking who owns the vampire tourist bar. The mysteries are mysterious, and could practically take up a whole season each book.

There are a lot of similarities between this series and the Laurell K. Hamilton Anita Blake books, which are sort of the gold standard for vampire lust-and-mystery books (though I’m increasingly unsure why). The lead characters are both female humans with special powers (telepath, necromancer), a huge dose of Christian guilt and little-to-no sexual awareness. They both accidentally-on-purpose get involved with a dark-haired vampire, get sucked into his politics, and end up being beaten and munched on by various undead creatures. Then they meet werewolves. And other shapeshifters. Who are all hot and want to tittie-fuck them. So far, the Harris books have been way more modest in their sex scenes (i.e. no orgies where the main characters change from human to leopard in a gush of fluid, or no threeways where the woman has to ask the man behind her not to do anal. I’m so not a prude, but it wasn’t quite what I signed on for when I started that series), but things are leaning that way. And Anita didn’t become a whore until about book eight, so there’s still time for Sookie to catch up.

I’m hoping that the HBO deal will keep Ms Harris more grounded in her future books. There are several hottie-hot-hot vamps and werewolves introduced already that Sookie could be stuping. She doesn’t need to meet any sexy new werechickens or lust-demons or businessmen from Chicago looking for a good time.

Okay, now I feel dirty. I think I need to read something substantive now. Maybe Tolstoy’s not a bad idea for me, either. I have owned War and Peace since 1993 and haven’t even cracked it open. Is that bad?