Review: Dead Ever After (Sookie Stackhouse 13) by Charlaine Harris

Genre: paranormal romance

Target audience: adults

Form: pdf, e-book

Synopsis:

Sookie is going to face  sharp, unexpected turns and twists of fate. Nothing new, right? Ok, perhaps nothing new for the faithful readers of the series but it is supposed to be new to her. You see, she will have to redefine her love life and her social status. She will have to face the music after the magic revival of Sam Merlotte, her former boss and her business partner. She will be pursued and harmed and hurt. She will experience the force of true friendship and the bitterness of an estrangement. She will find her true partner for life. She will be shot at and wrongly accused of murder. Will she survive? It’s the last part, officially anything can happen and yet…and yet… you don’t have to be a Sherlock Holmes to guess the rest. Because the rest is the silence (and I would love to add ‘the silence of the lambs’ but I suppose I would get you spooked so let’s leave that out, ok? Just an innocent remark in parentheses).

My impressions (with spoilers):

Writing a book is a strange business. Sometimes you think you get all the ingredients for a great story and you find yourself one character or one scene short for a complete, unparallel disaster. Sometimes you think the whole enterprise is just a silly prank and you are wrong again. Finishing a popular series is even a stranger business. You already know it’s been a success, you have your devout audience, plenty of people have nourished their own expectations concerning the story and now they want you to deliver. What to do? Fulfill the wishes of your most faithful fans (hey, they deserve it! They’ve voted with their money and made it happen!)? Follow stubbornly and proudly your own vision (providing you’d had one at all)? Listening to your editor, publisher and marketing gurus who are whispering in your ear some uncomfortable truths (‘hey, it’s the last chance to earn a bit more, most probably not to be repeated any time soon!’)? All of the above? Neither of the above?

I completely agree that finishing a series is more daunting a task than starting one. I do applaud Ms Harris that she never went back on her word (she’d promised she wouldn’t follow the example of Twilight and her Sookie would never become a vampiress). Still the last Sookie novel left me cold, miserable, shrugging and sad. As I predicted some time ago (and no, I wasn’t alone) Sookie ended up with Sam. Yes, it was a kind of disaster. I’m writing it without even a drop of malicious satisfaction.

Yes, I used to like that silly Sookie girl and her supernaturally exciting albeit completely small-scale life in the middle of nowhere (read: the southern rural America). Some of the installments were better, some were worse but in those better ones I found really good observations about the contemporary America and its inhabitants – their hopes and fears dressed up as supernatural creatures of different but mostly bloody sorts. Meanwhile the last part sounded banal and boring, from the beginning to the very end, as if it was written by somebody else who just gritted her teeth and ploughed through the plot to finish the blasted thing once and for good. Yes, the book consisted of roughly the same elements as the previous ones but somehow the whole magic was gone and my interest was never stirred, not even once.

Now the list of my woes. Sookie predicaments rang hollow. Her love life went into a nose-dive with Eric so clearly out of the picture most of the time (if I had to be honest it had gone into a nose-dive even one or two installments earlier but at that point you still could hope). I didn’t care whether the unimportant and completely superficial crime riddle concerning the death of a certain white trash slut called Arlene would be solved or not. I didn’t enjoy the cavalcade of different, half-forgotten characters from previous parts the authoress forced to parade through more than half of the book without any sense, reason or fun. The new child of Eric, an ashen blonde called Katrin the Slaughterer, was almost comically bland compared to other vampires who had been presented in the heyday of the series. The almost- final sex scene between Sookie and Sam left me bored stiff and yawning (seriously, I bet sex in elderly nursing homes can be more hot than that). Nothing made sense. Nothing was new or clever or funny. Nothing worked anymore.

Final verdict:

Yes, I have been warned not to read this one. Yes, I couldn’t stop myself, especially that a friend lent me the book so I didn’t have to buy it. Yes, I regret it ended how it ended. Yes, I wasted an hour or two of my life again. Flames to dust… Now I need a pick-me-up rather badly. In fact it should be added to every copy of this novel for free.

Guest review: Deadlocked by Charlaine Harris, written by The Red Witch

This Monday I am very happy to welcome my another Internet friend, The Red Witch, who very kindly agreed to review for me "Deadlocked" by Charlaine Harris. You see, we've been both fans of the series and we've discussed it from time to time. I think The Red Witch would do it more justice than me (it is, after all, a paranormal romance).

Let me only mention that The Red Witch, a very clever, scholarly and funny lady (yes, it is possible), writes her own great blog entitled Distracted From the Now. Isn't it a nice name? The content is even nicer - go and visit and you'll see!

 Ok, here my ramblings end, let's progress to the review itself:

Deadlocked is the twelfth volume of the very popular Southern Vampire series by Charlaine Harris that was turned into the wildly popular HBO series True Blood. Originally, she had a contract to write ten books in the series but in the fall before the tenth book came out, Harris revealed that she had agreed to write three more books.  It is difficult to say how she would have written it had there not been a commitment to write three more, but the ninth book introduced Sookie's vampire lover's maker, a Roman from the time of Christ named Appius Livius Ocella. 

Eric Northman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

        Eric, a Viking, was turned by Appius around the turbulent time of the North’s conversion to Christianity, although Eric was a heathen at the time he became a vampire. In the ninth book, Dead and Gone, Harris gave out some of Eric's backstory(including that he had been married and had children) but neglected to identify what country he was from. He was also given Northman as a surname but it really only describes what he is; he should have been called Eric So-and-So's-son but I am nitpicking. Most people would not know or care.

        In Dead in the Family, the tenth book, Appius showed up at Sookie's house with Eric's 'brother' and he made a cryptic pronouncement just before his final death that Sookie would never keep Eric. In the eleventh book, it became increasingly clear what Appius meant by this and the twelfth book Deadlocked is largely concerned with the problem of Appius having betrothed Eric to a vampire queen. In spite of Sookie knowing that Eric cannot disobey a direct order from his maker, thanks to the strength of the blood bond with Eric and the odd feelings it gave Sookie when Appius showed up at her house, Sookie feels Eric has betrayed her by not outright refusing the queen. Harris wrote in Dead and Gone:

Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) is the main character of the series. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

        "As I felt his fear roll through me, I understood that Eric had to physically perform whatever Ocella ordered him to do.  Before that it had been an abstract concept. Now I realized that if Ocella ordered Eric to kill me, Eric would be compelled to do it."

That was in Book 9, by Book 12 Sookie would forget all that and insist that Eric break off the engagement because Appius was dead, even though Freyda was a powerful queen whom it would be risky to offend and Eric is in trouble with his own king, Felipe, for having killed second in command Victor Madden. (Book 11)

        Complicating the situation is the fact that Sookie's fairy great- grandfather Niall likes Eric and approves of him and had revealed to him that Sookie had a way out for both of them - the mysterious cluviel dor, a magical fairy object that Sookie's fairy grandfather had given to her human grandmother as a token of his love. It could be used for one wish, one wish only, and must be used for someone you love.

        Eric is too proud to ask Sookie to use the object to save him because he thinks, if she loves him, then she will offer. She thinks that he should not need saving and if he loved her, he would simply refuse to marry Freyda although she should know how dangerous and impossible that is for Eric as well as herself.

        Sookie is getting older and her friends are all settling down to married life and starting families. She clearly longs for a child but this is something that Eric cannot give her. In spite of her desire to avoid vampire and shapeshifter politics, those politics draw her in against her will and threaten her life once again.

        At the end, we find out how Sookie chose to use the cluviel dor(a choice which no doubt left some fans very unhappy) but the difficulty between the two lovers would not be resolved. That will have to wait until next year when the last book comes out. Harris has announced that it will be called Dead Ever After and has even mentioned that we will be introduced to Eric's other progeny who is named Karin. I, for one, can hardly wait.

Ancient Roman Marble (Photo credit: Swamibu)